This blog has been suffering from a bad case of thesis-writing neglect. But I’m getting there. I just launched thesis.ideophone.org,…
One of my projects here at The Ideophone has been to track down early sources on ideophonic phenomena. For example, I have suggested that we may call the 1850’s the decade of the discovery of ideophones in African linguistics. But we can push back the linguistic discovery of ideophones a little further by looking to other traditions. Today we look at Japanese, for which I have found some early 17th century grammatical treatises that offer information on ideophones.
High time for a new issue of ‘Ideophones around the web’. First, the ultimately blend of ideophone and idiophone: Nick…
Language in Society just published a book note by me on the second edition of Deborah Tannen’s well-known book Talking…
Dutch national quality newspaper NRC Handelsblad featured an extensive interview on ideophones and my research this weekend in their Science…
Today’s question: do ideophones really stand out that much? This is something you can only decide for yourself. Here are three examples from Siwu. They come from my corpus of everyday discourse and represent the three most common ideophone constructions. These three constructions account for 88% of 230 ideophone tokens in the corpus; the examples thus can be said to be typical of ideophone usage in day to day conversations in Siwu
On the whole, however, it is safer to see ideophones and similar sounds as proof of their users’ sensitive feeling…
In their commentary on Evans & Levinson’s hotly debated Myth of Language Universals paper, Pinker & Jackendoff briefly mention ideophones — and erroneously shelve them away as ‘response cries’. What could go wrong?
LDLT2, the 2nd conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory, will be held in London this weekend. I’m looking forward…
Intangible and abstruse the bright silk of the sunlight Pours down in manifest splendor, You can neither stroke the…
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…
Up next week: the Seventh Biennial Symposium on Iconicity in Language and Literature (programme here), at Victoria College, University of…
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…
The closing paragraphs of my previous post were cited in several places as evidence of a cultural revival. Although it is too soon to say whether this is the case, I’m glad to report that the dirges that we recorded in Akpafu-Todzi are in wide circulation now. Here i share an example with analysis.
Just a quick follow-up on my earlier post. Foroni & Semin (in press, Psychological Science) do what I hoped somebody…
A 2005 study suggests that Japanese ideophones of laughter activate striatal reward centers in the brain, but I think the…
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…