Ideophones, like so many things in life, are easy to identify but hard to define. Here I describe the process of iterating on a definition of this phenomenon in search of a formulation that is useful in cross-linguistic research.
Just out: a new issue of SemiotiX, the e-journal on all things semiotic edited by prof. Paul Bouissac. Among other…
Food writer Molly Watson from Gastronomica provides us with an update of Bourdieu’s food space, where different types of food…
I’ve been reading Daniel Dor’s manuscript Language as a Communication Technology (available here), and found this observation on grammaticality judgements…
ELAN (lat-mpi.eu/tools/elan) is a widely used tool for the transcription, annotation, and analysis of audio and video data. This posting…
Note to readers: Portions of this post have been revised and published in the following paper: Dingemanse, Mark. 2019. “Ideophone”…
Duplicate detection is one of the things any serious reference manager should offer. Zotero users have been clamouring for it…
Last week the Portland Review published a beautiful ideophone poem by Stacey Tran, titled From the World Encyclopedia of Ideophones.…
Update: SemiotiX issue XN-8 features a revised and expanded version of this essay. The linguistic blogosphere featured some posts recently…
This long overdue instalment of Ideophones around the web features ideophones in the names of snappy new mobile apps from…
One of the earliest English sources on the geology of what is today the Volta Region in eastern Ghana is…
Travel journals provide some of the first written sources on Akpafu. I have previously posted an excerpt from a 1887 journal by David Asante. This here is an excerpt from a similar journey two years later. The whole journey took three months, but this excerpt relates only a trip to two Akpafu towns on 17-18 December 1889. Nicolas Clerk, an indigenous missionary born in Aburi, was alone during the first part of the journey and accompanied by his colleague Hall from Dec. 30 onwards.
I loved Daniel Tammet’s second book Embracing The Wide Sky (2009). In his own words, Embracing The Wide Sky is “a…
Here’s a quick tip for Zotero users who like to do their browsing in Chrome or Safari: you can install…
Lɛkɛrɛɛ and lukuruu are two Siwu ideophones depicting imagery of being well-rounded. But they differ in degree. One of them…
A new version of ELAN, the widely used tool for time-aligned annotation of linguistic data, was released today by the…
Last year’s post on the Great Minds of the 21st Century award continues to attract attention from people who want…
One of the most interesting sources on the history and customs of the Mawu people of eastern Ghana (also known…
Just out: A new issue of the journal Senses & Society, featuring research by a dozen contributors to the Language…
The first ever published account of a visit to Akpafu was written by David Asante, a Twi pastor who travelled throughout today’s Volta Region in the company of some white missionaries. The journey took place in January 1887; the date of the visit to Akpafu was January 25th, 1887. The account was originally written in Twi, and translated in German in 1889 by the eminent linguist J.G. Christaller, who published it in a German geographical journal. This post provides an English translation.