A serendipitous wormhole into #EMCA history. I picked up Sudnow’s piano course online and diligently work through the lessons. Guess…
Few historical maps of Ghana’s Volta and Oti regions have been invested with so much political and sociohistorical meaning as…
Just out in Glossa, the premier open access journal of general linguistics: Dingemanse, Mark. 2018. “Redrawing the Margins of Language:…
Here are some insights from J.R. Firth in 1935 that offer an interesting early outlook on language use in social…
Last year Sabine Reiter defended an interesting PhD thesis on ideophones in Awetí, a Tupian language spoken in the Upper…
“A struggle for life is constantly going on among quotations in academic writings. The better, the shorter, the easier forms…
With the help of the Radboud University and MPI Nijmegen librarians I’ve been tracking down an obscure but historically important…
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…
One of the most interesting sources on the history and customs of the Mawu people of eastern Ghana (also known…
This is the first ever published account of a visit to Akpafu. It was written down by David Asante, a…
One of my projects here at The Ideophone has been to track down early sources on ideophonic phenomena. For example,…
It is high time for a continuation of our series honouring the ancestors of ideophone studies. Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle is…
The oldest written fragments of Siwu found so far come from Rudolph Plehn (1898). Besides some words and phrases (edited…
In pursuit of early written sources about Kawu I came across a useful summary of explorations in the Volta Basin…
The steady influx of vocabularies of ‘exotic’ languages during the nineteenth century caused a veritable flowering of comparative philology in…
Part two of our series on early sources (part one is here) is dedicated to Reverend O. E. Vidal, M.A.…
The earliest description of Kawu (Akpafu) I have found so far is quite special in that it was written by…
In an excellent post over at Greater Blogazonia, Lev Michael unravels a spectacular error which led several eminent specialists of…
Today’s posting brings you the second part of Pfisterer’s 1904 article (see the previous posting for details on the context…