-
Early sources on African ideophones, part IV: S.W. Koelle on Kanuri, 1854
It is high time for a continuation of our series honouring the ancestors of ideophone studies. Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle is one of the founding fathers of African linguistics, and 1854 was one of his more productive years. In the same year, besides his Kanuri grammar (from which the excerpt below is taken), he issued what… ᐅ keep reading
-
Ideophones around the web
With another busy summer gone, here is a post highlighting some of the stuff that’s floated by in the ideophonic blogosphere. I haven’t seen anything like last year’s ideophonic earrings, but we do have more news on Sotho siks!, the introduction of ideophones in the Nyungwe Bible, and a postcard from Taiwan on ideophones in… ᐅ keep reading
-
Bingo! Refinding the oldest specimen of Siwu
The oldest written fragments of Siwu found so far come from Rudolph Plehn (1898).1 Besides some words and phrases (edited and published in 1899 by his friend Seidel), Plehn took down two lines of songs. To one of them I devoted a post some time ago. Now I’ve found a full transcription of the other,… ᐅ keep reading
-
‘If you do not speak Siwu to me in my home, I will not pay your school fees!’
One day in Accra, my daughter came home from school and talked to me in English. I said, “I no be hear English.1 In my home, we speak Siwu.” My daughter said, “But the teacher has said that we should not speak Vernacular at home!” Vernacular! Vernacular! By that he means any local language other… ᐅ keep reading
-
Synaesthesia: a cross-cultural pilot
We’ve just launched the web page for a project we’ve been working on in the Language & Cognition group: Synaesthesia across cultures. The most exciting part of the project is the second iteration of a pilot we’ve developed for cross-cultural field research on the forms and prevalence of synaesthesia. In contrast to online tests (e.g.… ᐅ keep reading
-
On literariness
Embedded in the Iconicity conference in Toronto is a pleasant surprise: a three-day workshop entitled Cognitive Poetics: A Multimodal Approach. Speakers include Reuven Tsur, David Herman, Margaret Freeman, David Miall, Zoltan Kövecses, Yeshayahu Shen, Mark Changizi, and of course the organizer, the colourful Paul Bouissac. (As an aside, I can’t resist quoting the latter on… ᐅ keep reading
-
Upcoming talk: Ezra Pound among the Mawu
Up next week: the Seventh Biennial Symposium on Iconicity in Language and Literature (programme here), at Victoria College, University of Toronto, June 9-14, 2009. It looks like an interesting bunch of linguists and literary theorists. I will give a talk on Tuesday the 9th, the abstract for which can be found below. Ezra Pound among… ᐅ keep reading
-
Two talks on ideophones at SOAS
If you’re in London and able to come to SOAS at short notice, there will be two talks on ideophones tomorrow afternoon: one by my colleague Sylvia Tufvesson and one by myself. The talks will be on Wednesday, 3 June, 3-5pm, in room 4418 in SOAS. Here are the titles and abstracts: Phonosemantics and perceptual… ᐅ keep reading
-
AAA Meeting Abstracts online? Only viable if it’s Open Access
The AAA is currently conducting a survey on how to implement a website that would be hosting AAA Meeting Abstracts. As they write, Specifically, we’re investigating posting the 2007 and 2008 AAA annual meeting paper abstracts, which would be posted exactly as they were submitted to AAA and would not be interactive, although they would… ᐅ keep reading
-
How is Sotho siks! doing?
In a neat 1965 paper on ideophones in Southern Sotho, Daniel P. Kunene writes about an ideophone derived from a gesture: There is an interesting and amusing case of the coining of an ideophone from the type of gesture used. The gesture for running is clenched fingers, outstretched thumb pointing upwards and wiggled from side… ᐅ keep reading
-
Some miracle of cloning
“See what I just did? Made another me.” Darwin (Marvel Comics), panel from X-Factor issue 37. There is a very quirky sentence right in the first chapter of Richerson & Boyd’s (2005) Not By Genes Alone that unintentionally defeats the very point they are making. After explaining why ‘culture is essential’ (the chapter title) and… ᐅ keep reading
-
Dashboard Post-it: leave notes on the WordPress dashboard
Dashboard Post-it is a simple plugin for WordPress 2.7 and higher that allows you to leave yourself or other authors a note on the dashboard. It is implemented as a configurable dashboard widget, so you can collapse it, move it around, and edit it as any other dashboard widget. It will accept plain text or… ᐅ keep reading
-
A cultural revival?
Jedesmal, wenn ein Solo beendet hat, fällt der ganze Chor ein und singt einen Refrain, der aber nur aus den verschiedenen Vokalen besteht, die auf alle möglichen und unmöglichen Arten ausgesprochen werden, also eigentlich immer dasselbe. Interessant wäre es, einen solchen Gesang aufzunehmen. (Kruse, Krankheit und Tod in Akpafu, 1911, p. 192) Everytime when a… ᐅ keep reading
-
People are animals (sings the Isakpolo bird)
It is no news that people are animals, especially not this Darwin Year. But normally that something we say of ourselves. Wouldn’t it be rather more interesting if another member of the animal kingdom would weigh in on the matter? It happens in Kawu, where I am right now for fieldwork (hence the silence on… ᐅ keep reading
-
Giggles follow-up: smiling verbs and happy adjectives show facial motor resonances
Just a quick follow-up on my earlier post. Foroni & Semin (in press, Psychological Science) do what I hoped somebody did: examining the bodily grounding of non-ideophonic vocabulary related to emotional states. Theirs is not an imaging study like Osaka & Osaka 2005, but a study of motor resonance in facial muscles. The terms tested… ᐅ keep reading
-
Giggles and gargles
A 2005 study suggests that Japanese ideophones of laughter activate striatal reward centers in the brain, but I think the results should be treated with a pinch of salt. Speaking of salt, Japanese gargle with salt water regularly as a prevention against the common cold; they even have an ideophone for it (but so do… ᐅ keep reading
-
AAA Photo Contest galleries now online
The Winners and Finalists of the 2008 AAA Photo Contest are now available in a Flickr gallery. The photos are really beautiful — I’m honoured that one of my submissions is featured among them (and happy that Siwu ideophones are getting some press!). Click on a photo in the slideshow below to show the author… ᐅ keep reading
-
Zotero 1.5 is here: synchronization and tons of other features
It’s here. Zotero 1.5 beta. The new version comes with built-in synchronization, exports to more than 1100 citation styles, and supports browsing your library online (see below). Zotero is now better than EndNote on all fronts. Here’s a quick overview of the most important features: Synchronization. Automatically keep your library in sync across different PCs.… ᐅ keep reading
-
The Enduring Spoken Word
Science has just published a comment by me on Oard’s “Unlocking the potention of the spoken word” (Oard 2008). It is a critique of the monomodal view of language adopted in that article. (If you haven’t read the original piece, check it out here, or see my brief summary.) ᐅ keep reading
Sounding out ideas on language, vivid sensory words, and iconicity
