Category Archives: Early sources

‘Early sources’, as used here, refers to sources of linguistic and anthropological interest that are relatively old and often hard to come by. This includes early descriptions of African languages but also photos and text from missionary archives. One of the goals of The Ideophone is to make such sources freely available where possible.

A serendipitous wormhole into the history of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (EMCA)

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A serendipitous wormhole into #EMCA history. I picked up Sudnow’s piano course online and diligently work through the lessons. Guess what he says some time into the audio-recorded version of his 1988 Chicago weekend seminar (see lines 7-11)

[Chicago, 1988. Audio recording of David Sudnow’s weekend seminar]

We learn too quickly and cannot afford to contaminate a movement by making a mistake.

People who type a lot have had this experience. You type a word and you make a mistake.

I have been involved, uh of late, in: a great deal of correspondence in connection with uh a deceased friend’s archives of scholarly work and what should be done with that and his name is Harvey. And about two months ago or three months ago when the correspondence started I made a mistake when I ( ) taped his name once and I wrote H A S R V E Y, >jst a mistake<.

I must’ve written his name uh two hundred times in the last few months in connection with all the letters and the various things they were doing. Every single time I do that I get H A S R V E Y and I have to go back and correct the S. I put it in the one time and my hands learned a new way of spelling Harvey. I call ‘m Harvey but my hands call ‘m Hasrvey.

And they learned it that one time. Right then and there, the old Harvey got replaced and a new Harvey, spelled H A S R V E Y got put in. So we learn very fast.

Folks who know #EMCA history will notice this is right at the height of the activity of the Harvey Sacks Memorial Association, when Sudnow, Jefferson, Schegloff, and others were exchanging letters on Sacks’ Nachlass, intellectual priority in CA, and so on

We have here a rare first person record of the activity that Gail Jefferson obliquely referred to in her acknowledgement to the posthumously published Sacks lectures (“With thanks to David Sudnow who kick-started the editing process when it had stalled”), and much more explicitly in an 1988 letter (paraphrased in Button et al. 2022).

Historical interest aside, I like how the telling demonstrates Sudnow’s gift for first-person observation — a powerful combination of ethnomethodology and phenomenology that is also on display in his books, Pilgrim in the Microworld and Ways of the Hand #EMCA

Originally tweeted by @dingemansemark@scholar.social (@DingemanseMark) on October 6, 2022.

The Gruner Map: a 1913 map of the Togo Plateau in present-day Ghana

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Few historical maps of Ghana’s Volta and Oti regions have been invested with so much political and sociohistorical meaning as Hans Gruner’s 1913 map of the Togo Plateau. Gruner, stationed for over twenty years at Misahöhe in present-day Togo, was a long-time colonial administrator known for his ethnographical and historical knowledge of the area. His name is still known in most localities depicted on the map, as I attested in Akpafu myself (I’ve written about the map on this blog before). Besides Akpafu, we find the communities Santrokofi, Gbi, Alavanyo, Nkonya, and Bowiri on this map.

The map is not uncontroversial and is in the first place a political object, serving a double goal of documentation and geopolitical regimentation. Gruner worked with the communities bordering on the Togo Plateau and saw to it that all of them received an official copy, some of which still survive. It was widely accepted by most of the communities, was adopted and used by British colonial authorities in the 1920s, and has since been upheld by the Ghana High Court numerous times as the definitive demarcation for settling land claims and boundary disputes, though the Nkonya-Alavanyo border remains disputed, with conflicts flaring up every now and then (Penu & Essaw 2019).

Gruner is still a household name in part because was a petty tyrant with a powerful grip on ‘his’ Misahöhe district. In the 1890s he played a key role in expanding the German colonial sphere and violently subjugating people that were in the way of German commercial and political interests. He led the infamous 1894/95 Togo Hinterland expedition, which sought to extend Germany’s sphere of influence ostensibly under the goal of building scientific and ethnographic collections (the latter obtained by buying or by looting). The influential Dente Bosomfo at Kete-Krachi was executed in public by firing squad under Gruner’s direction in November 1894, and Gruner subsequently oversaw the plundering of the Dente shrine (Maier 1980, Hüsgen 2020). He was stationed at Misahöhe between 1896 and 1914 and was presumptuous enough to give himself the title of “Graf von Misahöhe”.

Obscure and hard to find

Despite its historical significance and continuing local geopolitical relevance, access to the Gruner Map has been severely restricted for over hundred years, and interested parties have been pointed to archival copies in the custody of local authorities or in libraries in Europe that carry copies of Mitteilungen aus den deutschen Schutzgebieten, the obscure and long-defunct German colonial-era journal in which the map was originally published as a supplement. Here’s a photograph of one of the copies surviving in Ghana:

Original copy of Gruner’s map as photographed by Penu & Essaw 2019 ‘during fieldwork in April 2015’

Now in the public domain

This situation is far from desirable: material of such significance should be available freely and at the highest possible quality to anyone interested. Fortunately, digitisation puts early sources within reach of anyone with an internet connection, and it has been possible for a while to now to find low-resolution copies online. But we can do better. Therefore I am making available a new high resolution scan of the map that I made myself with the help of the librarians at the MPI for Psycholinguistics. Here it is:

If ~5000x7500px is too large for you, try this slightly more reasonably sized one at 2000×2700 pixels, sourced from the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek: Gruner map, 1913, JPG (2Mb, 2000×2707 pixels). Given that the map is from 1913 and its makers died in 1928 (Sprigade) and 1943 (Gruner), I consider it to be in the public domain.

To be clear: I take no position in any territorial disputes in which this old map may or may not be relevant. My position is that information wants to be free. For an overview of the Nkonya/Alavanyo conflicts, the contested role of the Gruner Map, and alternative ways of determining the relevant boundaries, see Penu & Essaw 2019 (PDF).

Historical & ethnographical interest

The communities featured on the map are, in clockwise order from top right and by their present-day designations: Akpafu, Santrokofi, Gbi, Alavanyo, Nkonya, and Bowiri. Gruner used a Germanized spelling, as seen in Sandrokofi and Kunja, and was somewhat erratic in keeping (Egbi) or leaving out (Lavanyo, Kunja) presyllabic vowels and nasals.

Even though the map is mostly known for its local geopolitical significance, there is another reason to share it: it has great historical-descriptive value. Just taking the Akpafu area (which I know best), it is clear that placenames have been faithfully recorded in such a way that we can recognise and even parse many local toponyms (e.g., Eprimkato = Iprimu-kato ‘the top of Iprimu’, Klasereré ɔkàlà-sɛrɛrɛ ‘steep sleeping mat’, and so on). Moreover, many abandoned settlements in the Kùbe mountains —of great historical and archaeological significance because of the famed local iron industry— are indicated on the map.

In short, the Gruner map offered unprecented detail for its time and was underpinned by considerable geological, ethnographical and sociological research. The research underlying the map was amply documented in an often-overlooked 12 page treatise that accompanies the map and that is also made available digitally here, perhaps for the first time (Gruner 1913):

While I have published translations of German early sources on this blog before, and in general I try to go out of my way to make early work accessible to as many readers as possible, I don’t quite have the resources right now to commit to a translation of this 12-page treatise, which is all the more reason to make the original German available. Perhaps others will beat me to translating it.

References & further reading

  • Gruner, Hans. 1913. Begleitworte zur Karte des Sechsherrenstocks (Amandeto). Mitteilungen aus den deutschen Schutzgebieten 26(2). 127–139.
  • Gruner, Hans & Sprigade, P. & Ketzer, H. 1913. Karte des Sechsherrenstockes (bisher Kunjagebirge genannt). Nach den Aufnahmen des Regierungsrats Dr. H. Gruner unter Leitung von P. Sprigade bearbeitet und gezeichnet von H. Ketzer. Mitteilungen aus den deutschen Schutzgebieten 26 (Karte 3).
  • Hüsgen, Jan. 2020. Colonial Expeditions and Collecting – The Context of the “Togo-Hinterland” Expedition of 1894/1895. Journal for Art Market Studies 4(1). (doi:10.23690/jams.v4i1.100)
  • Maier, Donna. 1980. Competition for Power and Profits in Kete-Krachi, West Africa, 1875-1900. The International Journal of African Historical Studies. Boston University African Studies Center 13(1). 33–50. (doi:10.2307/218371)
  • Penu, Dennis Amego Korbla & Essaw, David Wellington. 2019. Geographies of peace and violence during conflict: The case of the Alavanyo-Nkonya boundary dispute in Ghana. Political Geography 71. 91–102. (doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.03.003)
  • ModernGhana: The Gruner Map is over 100 years old (2013)

New paper: Redrawing the margins of language

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Just out in Glossa, the premier open access journal of general linguistics:

Dingemanse, Mark. 2018. “Redrawing the Margins of Language: Lessons from Research on Ideophones.” Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 3 (1): 1–30. doi:10.5334/gjgl.444. (download PDF)

In this paper I take up the theme of marginality (as distinct from rarity) from my 2017 essay, and take it in a different direction. I argue that the narrative of marginalisation, while historically justified, no longer suffices for ideophones, and that it obscures some of the insights from 150 years worth of research on this phenomenon. The paper is openly available so I won’t summarise it fully here; instead I’ll draw up a few of the lessons I learned while writing it.

How things get marginalised

As many have pointed out, ideophones have long been treated as marginal in linguistics. But how does something come to be seen as marginal? For ideophones, I found there are two basic strategies: assimilation and exceptionalism. In assimilation, we explain away a phenomenon by assuming it’s the same as something already familiar (and marginal anyway), giving us a reason to neglect it. In the case of ideophones, this is often done by shelving them away as interjections or as onomatopoeia. Exceptionalism is the reverse: we stress the utter difference of a phenomenon and thereby place it outside the bounds of normal linguistic inquiry — another reason to neglect it (or leave its investigation to scholars happy to work on ‘exotic’ topics).

One of the best examples of how exceptionalism works is Vidal, who in an introduction to a Yoruba dictionary wrote that he considered ideophones a “singularly unique feature” of the language, and continued, “therefore I shall not waste time in comparing it with the adverbial systems, whatever they may be, of other African languages” (Vidal 1852). Ironically, exceptionalism often arises out of a wish to stress the significance of something; but it may have the same effect as assimilation, namely to shield it from broader investigation. A goal of my paper is to walk the fine line between assimilation and exceptionalism: show what’s special about ideophones without losing sight of how they fit into the bigger picture.

Ideophones are a major word class in many languages

If you haven’t worked on or don’t speak a language with a well-developed ideophone system it can be hard to appreciate the sheer scale of ideophone inventories. Here’s a remarkable fact: in some of the most well-documented languages, ideophones are a major word class on the same order of magnitude as nouns or verbs. Would you be able to take a grammar seriously if it didn’t treat verbs? If you encounter a grammar of a Bantu language, or of Basque, Korean or Japanese, that doesn’t treat ideophones in detail, you should look at it with the same suspicion.

Language Reported magnitude of ideophone inventory
Basque “more than 4,500” (Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2006: 150)
Gbeya “over 3,000” (Samarin 1971: 161)
Japanese “4,500” (Ono 2007)
Korean “several thousands” (Sohn 2001: 96)
Semai “same order of magnitude” as nouns and verbs (Diffloth 1976: 249)
Turkish “one to two thousand” (Jendraschek 2001: 39)
Zulu “3,000” (von Staden 1977: 200)

Stress-testing theories

If ideophones indeed are a major word class in some languages, one consequence is that it becomes more urgent to include them in our theorising. What good is a theory of phonological features that can’t deal with the phonosemantic mappings or phonotactic markedness of a major word class? Or a theory of morphology that can’t deal with templatic phenomena? Or a theory of words that can’t deal with gradience in form and meaning? In the 1970’s and 1980’s, the time of the first ‘cross-linguistic encounter’, ideophones played an important role in theory formation in many areas of general linguistics.  Their role was often one of ‘stress-testing’ theories: ideophones provided the kind of boundary phenomena that could make or break generalisations.

For instance, ideophones played a crucial role in McCarthy’s (1983) new theory of nonconcatenative morphology. As he noted, “these exotic phenomena pervade the world’s languages with a regularity and complexity that makes them both essential and ideal for testing any theory of morphology”. By the way, that ideophones could be described as “exotic phenomena” and as “pervading the world’s languages with regularity” in one sentence is a perfect illustration of the viewpoint dependence of notions of marginality

Forgotten classics

Digging up old work on ideophones is very rewarding. It turns out luminaries like Vidal, Junod, and Westermann had lots of interesting stuff to say. One problem is that their work often comes in languages other than English — for instance, Junod wrote in French and Westermann in German. Since it bothered me that so few people had access to their pioneering work, my review presents some of their most insightful comments in the hope that others will benefit from them as well.

I’m particularly fond of Westermann, whose two classic papers on iconic mappings in West-African ideophones I made available for download before. These papers as well as his grammars and dictionaries of Ewe radiate a deep knowledge of the language, and his comments show how he worked closely with native speakers to really understand what ideophones do and how they work.

Diverse voices

Speaking of native speakers, one thing that is striking when you take any reasonably comprehensive bibliography of ideophone studies is the number of contributions by scholars who are also native speakers. It is hard to find other linguistic phenomena that have benefited so much from work by linguists with native speaker sensibilities. Especially in the last decades, this has shaped the course of developments in ideophone studies in important ways.

Here’s why this is important. As we have seen, marginality is to a large degree subjective: what you consider marginal depends on your methodological focus, your theoretical framework, your disciplinary upbringing, but also, importantly, your own native language(s). Scholars with native speaker sensibilities can provide an insider perspective that others may lack. It has been pointed out that having contributions from both native and non-native scholars is one of the most productive ways to do language science (Ameka 2006). Ideophone studies provide a good model for this.

In short

As ideophones are increasingly being brought into the fold of the language sciences,  they make visible our scholarly biases; they help us innovate methods and theories; and they keep giving us reasons to look at language with fresh eyes.

More in the paper: Dingemanse, Mark. 2018. “Redrawing the Margins of Language: Lessons from Research on Ideophones.” Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 3 (1): 1–30. doi:10.5334/gjgl.444. (download PDF)

Firth on the analysis of conversation (1935): sequence and social accountability

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Here are some insights from J.R. Firth in 1935 that offer an interesting early outlook on language use in social interaction. Firth (1890-1960) was an expert in phonetics and prosody, but always stressed the importance of the larger context in which words and utterances occurred. In this piece, he turns to conversation as a source of insight about language:

Neither linguists nor psychologists have begun the study of conversation; but it is here we shall find the key to a better understanding of what language really is and how it works.

Firth’s observations appear in the course of a methodological commentary on the problem of polysemy in lexicography and in language learning. His proposal is to let context contribute to a solution. As he notes, while “situations are infinitely various”, still “Speech is not the “boundless chaos” Johnson thought it was.” (p. 66). He continues:

Conversation is much more of a roughly prescribed ritual than most people think. Once someone speaks to you, you are in a relatively determined context and you are not free just to say what you please. We are born individuals, but to satisfy our needs we have to become social persons, and every social person is a bundle of rôles or personae

As Firth observes, in conversation, you are not free to say what you please. Instead, what has been said before shapes and constrains your options, and what you say similarly shapes and constrains what happens further on. When conversation analysts talk about how any turn is both context-shaped and context-renewing (in Heritage’s apt formulation), this is essentially what they mean. Further, an important aspect of constraints on what is said derives from the need to manage social roles and personae: Goffman avant la lettre. These points together moreover bring into view a notion of social accountability.

Further on in the paper, Firth foreshadows notions like sequential structure and conditional relevance, which have come to occupy a key place in conversation analysis:

The moment a conversation is started, whatever is said is a determining condition for what, in any reasonable expectation, may follow. What you say raises the threshold against most of the language of your companion, and leaves only a limited opening for a certain likely range of responses. This sort of thing is an aspect of what I have called contextual elimination. There is a positive force in what you say in a given situation, and there is also the negative force of elimination both in the events and circumstances of the situation and in the words employed, which are of course events in the situation.

Again, the words “reasonable expectation” implicitly invoke a notion of accountability. Here Firth goes further into the idea of prior speech providing ‘determining conditions’ for what is sayable next. Take a polar question: it expects, invites (or as conversation analysts say, makes relevant) a limited range of answers, one type of which is preferred. The ‘limited opening for a certain likely range of responses’ is a proto-version of what conversation analysts have come to call conditional relevance and preference.

Firth’s observations on the structuring of conversation go beyond simple behavioristic conceptions like response probability and ‘behavior under the control of some stimulus’ (Skinner). His discussion captures the role of social accountability as well as the probabilistic aspects inherent in language use. His notion of ‘contextual elimination’ captures the sense in which one’s contribution to conversation shape and constrain what happens downstream without uniquely determining it.

While this paper is widely cited in corpus linguistic circles and in the Firth/Halliday tradition, Firth’s observations on conversation have rarely been drawn attention to, and there is as far as I know no direct historical connection between them and later insights developed in the field of conversation analysis, which started a few decades later in California with Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson. So this is likely a case of scholars reaching the same kind of conclusions independently — a powerful reminder of what can happen if we don’t assume conversation is messy and irregular, and instead sit down and take conversation for what it is: the primary ecology of language use, and one of the best places to gain new insights about the nature of language.

Firth, J. R. 1935. “The Technique of Semantics.” Transactions of the Philological Society 34 (1): 36–73. doi:10.1111/j.1467-968X.1935.tb01254.x.

Ideophones in Bakairi, Brasil, 1894

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Last year Sabine Reiter defended an interesting PhD thesis on ideophones in Awetí, a Tupian language spoken in the Upper Xingu area of central Brazil. In the introduction, she mentions an early source on ideophones in this area. It’s a vivid description of a native of Xingu felling a tree, and it’s full of ideophones and gestures:

Wie quält sich der Bakaïrí, um einen Baum zu fällen: frühmorgens, wenn die Sonne tschischi aufgeht, – dort im Osten steigt sie – beginnt er die Steinaxt zu schwingen. Und tschischi wandert aufwärts und der Bakaïrí schlägt wacker immerzu, tsök tsök tsök. Immer mehr ermüden die Arme, sie werden gerieben und sinken schlaff nieder, es wird ein kleiner matter Luftstoss aus dem Mund geblasen und über das erschöpfte Gesicht gestrichen; weiter schlägt er, aber nicht mehr mit tsök tsök, sondern einem aus dem Grunde der Brust geholten Aechzen. Die Sonne steht oben im Zenith; der Leib – die flache Hand reibt darüber und legt sich tief in eine Falte hinein – ist leer; wie hungrig ist der Bakaïrí – das Gesicht wird zu kläglichstem Ausdruck verzogen: endlich, wenn tschischi schon tief unten steht, fällt ein Baum: tokále = 1 zeigt der Kleinfinger. Aber Du, der Karaibe, – plötzlich ist Alles an dem Mimiker Leben und Kraft – der Karaibe nimmt seine Eisenaxt, reisst sie hoch empor, schlägt sie wuchtig nieder, tsök, tsök, pum – ah …, da liegt der Baum, ein fester Fusstritt, schon auf dem Boden. Und da und dort und wieder hier, überall sieht man sie fallen. Schlussfolgerung für den Karaiben: gieb uns Deine Eisenäxte. (Steinen 1894)

Sabine Reiter translates this passage as follows: “How the Bakaïrí struggles with felling a tree: early in the morning, when the sun tschischi rises, – there in the east it rises – he begins to swing his stone axe. And tschischi rises further, and the Bakaïrí – bravely – keeps beating tsök tsök tsök. His arms are getting tired, he rubs them; they drop down. A small and feeble puff of air escapes his mouth, he runs his hand over his exhausted face; he keeps beating, no longer with tsök tsök, but with a groan from deep within his chest. The sun has reached its zenith; the belly – the hand rubs over it and falls into a deep hollow – is empty; how hungry is the Bakaïrí – he shows the most miserable face: finally, when tschischi is already low, falls a tree: tokále = 1 shows the little finger. But you, the caraiba (nonindian), – suddenly everything on the mimic becomes lively and forceful – the caraiba takes his metal axe, swings it high up, strikes it down with force, tsök, tsök, pum – ah …, a last forceful kick, and there lies the tree on the ground. And there and yonder and here again, everywhere one sees them fall. Conclusion for the caraiba: give us your metal axes.”

For African languages, it looks like the earliest clear descriptions of ideophones go back to the 1850’s (Dingemanse 2011:Ch. 3). This particular instance from 1894 is one of the earliest sources I’ve seen yet for the Americas, but it would not surprise me at all to find much earlier descriptions (e.g. of ideophones in Quechua varieties?) given the linguistic interests of early colonisers (e.g. Jesuits) in the New World.

References

  • Dingemanse, Mark. 2011. “The Meaning and Use of Ideophones in Siwu”. PhD dissertation, Nijmegen: Radboud University. http://thesis.ideophone.org/.
  • Reiter, Sabine (2012). “Ideophones in Awetí”. PhD thesis, Köln: Universität zu Köln.
  • Steinen, Karl von den (1894). Unter den Naturvölkern Zentral-Brasiliens. Reiseschilderung und Ergebnisse der Zweiten Schingú-Expedition 1887-1888. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.

Evolving words — now on DLC

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“A struggle for life is constantly going on among quotations in academic writings. The better, the shorter, the easier forms are constantly gaining the upper hand and they owe their success to their own inherent virtue.”

Sounds familiar? Perhaps because it’s a variation on a bon mot attributed to Charles Darwin that you may have seen in any of a range of recent papers on how language evolves.

Darwin on Müller on Schleicher: "A struggle for life is constantly going on"

Darwin on Müller on Schleicher: “A struggle for life is constantly going on among the words and grammatical forms in each language.”

I just published a brief piece on this mutant quotation over at Diversity Linguistics Comment, the group blog initiated by Martin Haspelmath. Read it here.

Preview: a 1913 map of the Togo Hills

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With the help of the Radboud University and MPI Nijmegen librarians I’ve been tracking down an obscure but historically important map of the Togo Hills area in eastern Ghana. It’s a pretty large map, originally made available as an Appendix to a 1913 issue of the Mitteilungen aus den deutschen Schutzgebieten. I plan to make the whole thing available to the broader public in May on the occasion of a workshop celebrating 10 years of research on the GTM languages in Leiden.

But I can’t resist offering a sneak preview to show the amazing level of detail on this map. Here is a cut out showing part of Akpafu, with today’s Akpafu-Todzi on the extreme right (click the map to enlarge).

Part of Akpafu on a 1913 German map

Part of Akpafu on a 1913 German map

Continue reading →

Robertson’s Report on the geology of Western Togoland (1921)

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One of the earliest English sources on the geology of what is today the Volta Region in eastern Ghana is a survey report by Thomas Robertson. It was published in 1921 by the Gold Coast Geological Survey in Accra. The economical goals of the survey are clear from Robertson’s repeated examination of rivers for gold (“River X gave black sand but no gold on panning”). Download the report here (20Mb). Continue reading →

A visit to Akpafu by Nicolas Clerk, 1889

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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. Continue reading →

H.B.K. Ogbete, A history of the Akpafus

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One of the most interesting sources on the history and customs of the Mawu people of eastern Ghana (also known as the Akpafu) is a little book written in 1998 by Rev. H.B.K. Ogbete. This book contains a wealth of material: it records oral traditions, names of ancestors and chiefs, and a lot of background information on the culture of the Mawu. However, it is very difficult to find. Therefore, by popular demand, and with the permission of Prof. Kofi Agawu of Princeton University (who was involved in the publication of the book), I am making available a digital copy of it here.

Download it here: A history of the Akpafus (PDF, 2.5Mb)

Reference

  1. Ogbete, H. B. K. 1998. A history of the Akpafus. Onyase Press Limited.