A 2005 study suggests that Japanese ideophones of laughter activate striatal reward centers in the brain, but I think the…
Time flies vuuu. About one month ago, The Ideophone has silently celebrated its first birthday kananana. English interspersed with ideophones…
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…
While I’m busy analysing conversational data from the last two fieldtrips, my plan is treat you to a few fine…
Let me draw your attention to the newly added quote at the top right of this page: “…they are playthings,…
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…
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…
Some years ago I was following a course by Maarten Kossmann on Tuareg (Tamasheq, Tamajeq, Tamahaq). It was thoroughly enjoyable. After the first lecture we were all alotted a letter of the great Dictionnaire Touareg — Français (a consonant, obviously), and for the remainder of the course these 15 to 40 dictionary pages would form the basis for a number of excercises in the weeks to follow. Here I write about what I found on expressive verbs.
Languagehat’s news flash on w00t (chosen as the Merriam-Webster’s Word of ’07) piqued my interest. A quote: There’s a lot…
Featured philologist of today is Joh. Bernhard Schlegel, for providing us with precious data on ideophones (expressives) in nineteenth-century Ewe, a Kwa language of southeastern Ghana.