FeedBurner, a service for managing RSS feeds, provided us with a nice example of ideophonic language on its corporate blog…
With three mouth-related ideophones we’ve got a true proeverij this time. Welcome to dinner! You’re invited to try the first…
If one had to sum up their character in a short phrase one might say that they are poetry in…
While I’m busy analysing conversational data from the last two fieldtrips, my plan is treat you to a few fine…
In a previous post I have outlined the history of the term ideophone. This post takes on three common misunderstandings…
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.…
There are several ideophones in Siwu that have to do with silence. Here are a few examples: mì-lo kanananana! 2PL-be.silent…
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…
waza waza, Gomi 1989:193 · © 1989 I came across this lovely Japanese ideophone in my own copy of Gomi’s…
A while ago I spent some time with a language assistant to work through a list of the Siwu ideophones I collected so far. There were some interesting metalinguistic comments on the function of ideophones. Here are three representative exchanges.
Hello from the field! I’m currently on a five-week trip to Kawu in the beautiful Volta Region, eastern Ghana (see…
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.
What better way to compensate for the overload of text in the previous posts than with some excellent illustrations of…
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?