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Now live: SemiotiX New Series, a WordPress-based e-journal
Now online: SemiotiX New Series, an e-journal in semiotics. SemiotiX Bulletin has been around for several years, in hand-edited HTML. Its reincarnation, SemiotiX New Series, runs on WordPress, automating all of the technical stuff so that the editors can spend their time writing and editing contributions. Geek alert: the rest of this post details some… ᐅ keep reading
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Aduerbia sonus: Ideophones in two 17th century grammars of Japanese
One of my projects here at The Ideophone has been to track down early sources on ideophonic phenomena. For example, I have suggested that we may call the 1850’s the decade of the discovery of ideophones in African linguistics. But we can push back the linguistic discovery of ideophones a little further by looking to… ᐅ keep reading
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But is it grammar?
Finally, some commentaries on the Evans & Levinson paper are trickling down the blogosphere. Nigel Duffield‘s “Roll up for the mystery tour” is one. Unfortunately, the comments on that post are closed. I have a question, so let me just post it here, where the comments are open. ᐅ keep reading
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Ideophones around the web
High time for a new issue of ‘Ideophones around the web’. First, the ultimately blend of ideophone and idiophone: Nick Cave’s sound suits. Then, in English pop culture, the non-identity of ideophones and onomatopoeia is finally registering, thanks to bling. And finally, some word tasting notes on squee from Sesquiotica. ᐅ keep reading
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The clay tablet tradition of African comparative linguistics
Found this gem in a review of Paul de Wolf’s (1971) The Noun Class System of Proto-Benue-Congo: This work falls within the ‘clay tablet’ tradition of African comparative linguistics, and, like other things in the same tradition (Meinhof, Greenberg), it has the properties of being inscrutable and yet at the same time, in broad outline,… ᐅ keep reading
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A short review of Talking Voices (2nd ed)
Language in Society just published a book note by me on the second edition of Deborah Tannen’s well-known book Talking Voices. Here is the pdf. ᐅ keep reading
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Basquekpafu
There you are, author of such groundbreaking works as The African Origins of Classical Civilisation, Maori: The African Evidence, and Who were the Minoans?: an African answer. You now want to solve the Basque enigma once and for all, and since the general thrust of your work is to link everything to Africa one way… ᐅ keep reading
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Good press for ideophones!
Dutch national quality newspaper NRC Handelsblad featured an extensive interview on ideophones and my research this weekend in their Science section, written by Berthold van Maris. There’s no online version of the article, but here is a PDF version if you read Dutch (or even if you just want to appreciate the look of Siwu… ᐅ keep reading
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Great Minds of the 21st Century: an ABI scam
Just got this letter, on official-looking paper with an official-looking stamp: Dear Mr. Dingemanse: You have been nominated to appear in Great Minds of the 21st Century, a major reference directory including just 1,000 of the world’s top thinkers and intellectuals. (…) The ABI is contantly engaged with research centers throughout the world as well… ᐅ keep reading
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‘Do ideophones really stand out that much?’ (with sound clips)
Today’s question: do ideophones really stand out that much? This is something you can only decide for yourself. Here are three examples from Siwu. They come from my corpus of everyday discourse and represent the three most common ideophone constructions. These three constructions account for 88% of 230 ideophone tokens in the corpus; the examples… ᐅ keep reading
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The power of vivid suggestion
On the whole, however, it is safer to see ideophones and similar sounds as proof of their users’ sensitive feeling for language, a deep sensitive attachment to sounds and their power of vivid suggestion or representation. In many cases, a speaker or oral artist can avoid an ideophone by simply duplicating a word of action:… ᐅ keep reading
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The Senses in Language and Culture
The Language & Cognition group at the MPI for Psycholinguistics will present a session on The Senses in Language and Culture at the 108th AAA meeting in Philadelphia, December 2-6. Come visit us on Friday morning from 8.00-11.45 in the Liberty Ballroom A, on the 3rd Floor of the Downtown Marriott. ᐅ keep reading
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Oh no! Ideophones are not response cries!
Looking for a published version of this? These observations about ideophones vs. interjections also appear in a 2021 OUP Handbook article: Dingemanse, M. (2021). Ideophones. In E. van Lier (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Word Classes. Oxford University Press. doi: 10.31234/osf.io/u96zt In their commentary on Evans & Levinson’s recent hotly debated Myth of Language Universals… ᐅ keep reading
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Coming up: LDLT2 in London
LDLT2, the 2nd conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory, will be held in London this weekend. I’m looking forward to plenaries by Larry Hyman and Tania Kuteva, and to many other interesting talks. The very last slot on Saturday (17:00-17:30) is reserved for a paper titled ‘Ideophones in unexpected places’ by yours truly. I… ᐅ keep reading
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Subtitles in ELAN and beyond
ELAN is a tool for creating complex annotations on video and audio resources. It’s great for doing the hard work of annotation, but less ideal as a way of displaying the result, for example in a presentation. This brief tutorial covers a common use case: displaying a short stretch of video material with subtitles overlayed… ᐅ keep reading
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The body in Yoruba
When I finished my MA thesis back in 2006 I made it available online as a gesture to the Yoruba community. It used to be available from my site until I changed servers. Then some good soul uploaded it at Scribd, where it continued to draw visits from various Yoruba forums; however, this happened without… ᐅ keep reading
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No free ride for semiosis
There is no free ride for semiosis. Signs have a cost and a carbon footprint. Sign processes, in any form we can observe them, consume energy and produce heat. (…) Energetic and caloric constraints are generally overlooked in semiotic theorizing which is long on hot air and short on metrics. To the extent that we… ᐅ keep reading
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Intangible and abstruse
Intangible and abstruse the bright silk of the sunlight Pours down in manifest splendor, You can neither stroke the precise word with your hand Nor shut it down under a box-lid. Tsze Sze’s Second Thesis Ezra Pound, The Unwobbling Pivot, 1947 Taro Gomi said: “So linguists do not deal with onomatopoeic expressions. Or… ᐅ keep reading
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Unified Style Sheet for Linguistics Journals
Not all linguists may be aware of this, but since 2007 there has been a Unified Style Sheet for publications in our field, developed by the editors of a number of linguistic journals, including Language. (Oddly enough, just which journals besides Language joined in the effort remains unclear.) There is not much centralized information available… ᐅ keep reading
Sounding out ideas on language, vivid sensory words, and iconicity
