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Zap! Pow! Kraaakkkk! Ideophones for involvement at FeedBurner
FeedBurner, a service for managing RSS feeds, provided us with a nice example of ideophonic language on its corporate blog last year: Starting right now, you just log into your Blogger account, select Settings | Site Feed, enter your FeedBurner feed address and click “Save Settings.” Zap! Pow! Kraaakkkk! Now you’ve got the complete picture…
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Mumbling and other mouth sensations: Ideophone proeverij II (with sound clips)
With three mouth-related ideophones we’ve got a true proeverij this time. Welcome to dinner! You’re invited to try the first ideophone on the menu, mùkùmùkù. Feel free to sustain the mumbling to get some feeling for the word. Mùkùmùkùmùkùmùkù. The mumbling mouth movements of a toothless person. This is quite a special ideophone in that…
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‘Poetry in ordinary language’: Evans-Pritchard on ideophones
If one had to sum up their character in a short phrase one might say that they are poetry in ordinary language ; and one feels that no other sounds would serve the purpose equally well of evoking sensations which compose the meaning, just as one cannot think that any possible line could be substituted…
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Ideophone proeverij I
While I’m busy analysing conversational data from the last two fieldtrips, my plan is treat you to a few fine Siwu ideophones every once in a while: an ideophone proeverij. Incidentally, the title of this mini-series testifies to a sad lexical gap in English: there seems to be no good equivalent for the Dutch ‘proeverij’,…
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Three misconceptions about ideophones
In a previous post I have outlined the history of the term ideophone. This post takes on three common misunderstandings about the nature of ideophones. As an added bonus, if you read all three, you get one for free. The working definition I adopt for ‘ideophones’ is the following: Marked words that depict sensory imagery.…
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Early sources on African ideophones, part III: ‘Onomatopoeia as a formative principle’, 1886
The steady influx of vocabularies of ‘exotic’ languages during the nineteenth century caused a veritable flowering of comparative philology in Western Europe. It became en vogue to be looking at languages from outside Europe, and the late nineteenth century especially seems to have been a time in which every gent in academia (and yes, they…
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More on bíaàà and other water ideophones
drizzle by +lyn (Flickr) Without wanting to detract from the supreme rendering of bíààà in the previous post, here is some more linguistic information on the word (as rightly requested by Breffni), with a few other water ideophones added for good measure.
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Bíààà
The card arrived in the mail today, so I can now call myself the lucky owner of this rendition of the beautiful Kisi ideophone bíààà — ‘rain softly falling’. Some time ago I wrote about Taro Gomi’s illustrations of Japanese ideophones, citing his warning that “Linguists, who are always described by such orthodox adjectives as…
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The sound of rain falling, in your ears
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 with the Kisi ideophone bákàlà-bákàlà for ‘the sound of big, fat raindrops.’ I love the design, in which colour, shape and size work together to recreate the event evoked by the ideophone. Kisi [kqs] is…
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Somali ideophones revealed
I missed it back in March, probably because I was in the field: a delightful post on ideophones in Somali over at Beautiful Horn of Africa. An intriguing introduction… In this fast moving 21st Century of information superhighway, you should feel obligated to expose youself to the rest of the world so that your presence…
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Early sources on African ideophones, part II: Vidal on Yoruba, 1852
Part two of our series on early sources (part one is here) is dedicated to Reverend O. E. Vidal, M.A.1 who as early as 1852 made a number of very insightful comments on ideophones in Yoruba in the preface to Samuel Crowther’s Yoruba dictionary: There is another very striking feature in the Yoruba language, which…
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Kanananana
There are several ideophones in Siwu that have to do with silence. Here are a few examples: mì-lo kanananana! 2PL-be.silent IDPH (y’all) be silent kanananana! a-rɛ kpooo-o? 2SG-sleep IDPH-Q did you have a sound sleep? lò-to lò-karɛ ɔ itɔ̃me a-ɣɛ à-to à-nyɔ mɛ gbigbini-gbi 1SG-PROG 1SG-ask 2SG:O message 2SG-stand 2SG-PROG 2SG-look 1SG:O IDPH-REDUP1 I’m asking…
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Adjectives and the gospel in Ewe
Previously, we’ve looked at a perceptive account of ideophones in nineteenth-century Ewe by Joh. Bernard Schlegel. But Schlegel was not just a keen observator of the synchronic structure of Ewe, he also had clear ideas on where the language came from (damned primitivity) and where it was going (blessed enlightenment). A Pietist missionary above all…
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Under the spell of ideophones
One1 of the nice things about fieldtrips is getting immersed in another culture area with, for one thing, different news priorities. When in Ghana, I somehow find it relieving to read the news stories about the rise of herbal medicine, spectacular roundups of Nigerian armed robbers, local chieftaincy conflicts, and parcels of cocaine that miraculously…
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Waza waza
waza waza, Gomi 1989:193 · © 1989 I came across this lovely Japanese ideophone in my own copy of Gomi’s Illustrated Dictionary,1 and I’m sharing it waza waza just for you to enjoy. References Gomi, Taro. 1989. An Illustrated Dictionary of Japanese Onomatopoeic Expressions. Transl. by J. Turrent. Tokyo: Japan Times. Thanks to Mami Maruko…
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Fieldwork snippet: What ideophones do
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.
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Fieldwork snippet: What is the difference between these words?
Hello from the field! I’m currently on a five-week trip to Kawu in the beautiful Volta Region, eastern Ghana (see the picture to the right), hence the irregular posting schedule. In line with my main business here, I will share some notes on doing fieldwork. MD What about gligli? SA Gligli is ‘round’ MD But…
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Fresh wild melon and meat full of gravy: food texture verbs in G|ui (Khoisan)
Today’s dish of expressive vocabulary is particularly tasty. It comes from G|ui, a Khoisan language of Botswana.1 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…
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Do you know this feeling?
What better way to compensate for the overload of text in the previous posts than with some excellent illustrations of Japanese gitaigo? I have recently been looking at Taro Gomi’s delightful Illustrated Dictionary of Japanese Onomatopoeic Expressions, featuring cartoon-like depictions of almost 200 Japanese sound-symbolic words used to evoke certain sensations, feelings, and sensory perceptions.
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On the history of the term ‘ideophone’
(Note: Looking for a modern definition of the term? Check out “‘Ideophone’ as a comparative concept” (2019). That chapter supplies the following: Ideophone. Member of an open lexical class of marked words that depict sensory imagery. It provides evidence and arguments for the cross-linguistic utility of this definition.) A common term for expressive vocabulary in…