In which I highlight some findings on the language of perception in Siwu, a language of eastern Ghana, as described in a chapter in an eternally forthcoming edited volume. Studying the language of perception shows the deep entanglements of the sensory and social worlds we inhabit.
The Mawu of present-day Akpafu relate in their oral histories that their ancestors lived in the mountains between their current location and the Volta river, in an area currently known as the Togo Plateau. Names they use for this area include Mawu kùbe (‘Mawu mountain’) and Àwubeame (‘in the Mawu mountains’). Hunters who frequented the area told me they were familiar with several ìkpakpi (historical settlements). This post is a synthesis of information from historical maps, scientific literature, oral traditions, and my own trips with Mawu community members.
Natural conversations are a great source of data for all sorts of linguistic research. Linguists and conversation analysts usually study…
No matter how large or complex a PhD thesis, it should be possible to present an outline of the main…
With the help of the Radboud University and MPI Nijmegen librarians I’ve been tracking down an obscure but historically important…
In Kawu on the very final day of my 2012 fieldtrip, I heard something unusual. Some people talked about a…
Welkom Quest-lezers! Je komt hier misschien via het stukje in de Quest van januari 2013. Als taalwetenschapper bestudeer ik het…
Lɛkɛrɛɛ and lukuruu are two Siwu ideophones depicting imagery of being well-rounded. But they differ in degree. One of them…
One of the most interesting sources on the history and customs of the Mawu people of eastern Ghana (also known…
The first ever published account of a visit to Akpafu was written by David Asante, a Twi pastor who travelled throughout today’s Volta Region in the company of some white missionaries. The journey took place in January 1887; the date of the visit to Akpafu was January 25th, 1887. The account was originally written in Twi, and translated in German in 1889 by the eminent linguist J.G. Christaller, who published it in a German geographical journal. This post provides an English translation.
There you are, author of such groundbreaking works as The African Origins of Classical Civilisation, Maori: The African Evidence, and Who were the Minoans?: an African answer. You now want to solve the Basque enigma once and for all, and since the general thrust of your work is to link everything to Africa one way or another you set out to discover that Basque is in fact a Niger-Congo language. A look at the rich lexical material in Westermann (1927) provides ample inspiration. Let’s pick one of the Togo Remnant Languages, you think — after all, Basque is sort of remnant too. Akpafu. Euskara. Hey, why not. Let’s just see what we can do… no-one’s going to notice, right?
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
The oldest written fragments of Siwu found so far come from Rudolph Plehn (1898). This post relates how I traced a mangled 1898 fragment of a song to a hard-to-get modern-day MA thesis, and how I was able to translate it with the help of the Rev. Albert Wurapa.
One day in Accra, my daughter came home from school and talked to me in English. I said, “I no…
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.
It is no news that people are animals, especially not this Darwin Year. But normally that something we say of…
Funeral dirges (sìnɔ in Siwu) are sung during the period of public mourning preceding a burial. The musical structures of these dirges, the performances, and their place in the larger context of the funeral have been described in some detail by Agawu (1988) and before him by the German missionary Friedrich Kruse (1911); however, the linguistic aspects of the genre have not received any attention so far. Dirges are rarely heard in Kawu nowadays, but there are signs of a renewed interest in the genre.
Below follows an abstract for a talk I will be giving later this year at WOCAL 6. Ideophones are marked…
With three mouth-related ideophones we’ve got a true proeverij this time. Welcome to dinner! You’re invited to try the first…