Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle is one of the founding fathers of African linguistics, and 1854 was one of his more productive years: he published the first large-scale comparison of some 200 African languages (the famed Polyglotta Africana), but also a corpus of Kanuri folklore, a grammar of Vai, and a grammar of Kanuri. In the latter, he wrote about “singular adverbs which seem to be common in African languages” — one of the first comparative statements on the type of words that would later come to be known as ideophones.
With another busy summer gone, here is a post highlighting some of the stuff that’s floated by in the ideophonic…
One day in Accra, my daughter came home from school and talked to me in English. I said, “I no…
If you’re in London and able to come to SOAS at short notice, there will be two talks on ideophones…
In a neat 1965 paper on ideophones in Southern Sotho, Daniel P. Kunene writes about an ideophone derived from a…
Below follows an abstract for a talk I will be giving later this year at WOCAL 6. Ideophones are marked…
Time flies vuuu. About one month ago, The Ideophone has silently celebrated its first birthday kananana. English interspersed with ideophones…
The steady influx of vocabularies of ‘exotic’ languages during the nineteenth century caused a veritable flowering of comparative philology in…
drizzle by +lyn (Flickr) Without wanting to detract from the supreme rendering of bíààà in the previous post, here is…
The card arrived in the mail today, so I can now call myself the lucky owner of this rendition of…
More from the missed-while-I-was-in-the-field dept.: back in August, artisan jewelry shop My Word! featured a beautiful pair of earrings decorated…
I missed it back in March, probably because I was in the field: a delightful post on ideophones in Somali…
Part two of our series on early sources (part one is here) is dedicated to Reverend O. E. Vidal, M.A.…
In 1968 Bernd Heine published the first comparative study of the so-called Togorestsprachen. Around the same time Kevin Ford and…
Previously, we’ve looked at a perceptive account of ideophones in nineteenth-century Ewe by Joh. Bernard Schlegel. But Schlegel was not…
One 1 of the nice things about fieldtrips is getting immersed in another culture area with, for one thing, different…
In an excellent post over at Greater Blogazonia, Lev Michael unravels a spectacular error which led several eminent specialists of…
Today’s dish of expressive vocabulary is particularly tasty. It comes from G|ui, a Khoisan language of Botswana. To Africanists, expressive words from Khoisan languages are of special interest because Khoisan has been claimed on various occasions to lack ideophones, otherwise thought to be one of those linguistic traits that characterize Africa as a linguistic area. One particulary nice dataset comes from G|ui, a language of the central Kalahari desert sporting an impressive amount of food texture verbs. The data comes from a talk on perception in Kǂʰábá (Khoisan, closely related to G|ui) given by Hirosi Nakagawa at ALT 2007 in Paris.
The most common use of the term ‘ideophone’ today is as a term for a lexical or grammatical category of words. This use goes back to C.M. Doke, who introduced the term in this sense for the description of Bantu languages. However, Doke did not coin the term. Who did, and how was it used before Doke?
Featured philologist of today is Joh. Bernhard Schlegel, for providing us with precious data on ideophones (expressives) in nineteenth-century Ewe, a Kwa language of southeastern Ghana.