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- It has long been known that a feature characteristic of languages worldwide, but
particularly those of Africa, is ideophones, words of a distinct
semantic type, which may fill one or many syntactic slots.
- Ideophones may be defined as
a subset of sound symbolism, which also includes phonaesthemes and other methods of indicating
qualities (for example alternations of ± ATR vowels)
- This field is often referred to as phonosematics and has a long history
in Western philosophy. Plato’s Cratylus has a discussion of
phonaesthemes, for example
- Ideophones (or ‘expressives’ in Asian terminology) have
begun to be of more interest to the broader scholarly community (e.g.
Hinton et al, 1994).
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- Ideophones are abundant in natural and
heightened speech, notably in Africa, but absent from typical example
sentences, hence their failure to be treated adequately in typical
grammars and dictionaries.
- They are hard to elicit
since their existence is unpredictable and speakers have no natural
‘hook’ to recall them
- Their elusive nature, in grammatical terms, has made them poor relations
to other word classes and they have been little treated by the schools of grammar dominated by syntax
(see Welmers 1973 for comment on lacunae in research).
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- Typical examples in English are;
- Shilly-shally (verb)
- Hocus-pocus (noun)
- Namby-pamby (adjective)
- Dingdong (onomatopoeia)
- Helter-skelter (adverb/noun)
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- The first clear reference to
a class of ideophones was in 1886, where they are called
‘indeclinable verbal particles’ (McLaren 1886). Banfield
(1915) whose documentation for Nupe is particularly rich, calls them
‘intensitive adverbs’. Doke (1935) called them ‘a
vivid representation of an idea in sound’.
- Detailed studies such as
Kunene (1978) on Southern Sotho suggest that some Niger-Congo languages
may have thousands of such ideophones
- Our understanding of the
role they play in natural language (as opposed to elicited examples) is
still very preliminary.
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- It seems that ideophones are
far more prevalent in Africa than in other world language phyla.
- It is hard to be sure, but
lists of ideophones for other predominantly oral regions of the world
seem to be remarkably short
- Possibly because other
strategies (such as a rich repertoire of adjectives or adverbs or
phonoaesthemes) substitute.
- However, language phyla also
just differ and Africa may be a special case
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- The classification of ideophones remains under debate.
- They have been defined very broadly in the literature as anything with a
sound-symbolic element, in which case they can be found in all major
parts of speech. For
example, English verbs such as ‘gobble’ or
‘twinkle’ are sometimes treated as ideophones
- In this view, being ideophonic is more a matter of conforming to a
certain syllable structure.
- However, in many languages, specific words, which may or may not be
morphologically marked, fill a slot that would usually be adverbial.
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- In many languages, ideophones have distinctive phonotactics, although
this is not always the case.
- But they do always have highly specific applications to the sensory
world and describe visual, aural and emotional experiences in ways
hardly paralleled elsewhere in the lexicon.
- Historically, they are hard to treat, as they do not seem to be
lexically cognate across languages. There is one intriguing exception to
this, the worldwide word for ‘round, circle, wheel’ which is
often k-l- or k-r- in many language phyla.
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- In contrast, semantically,
sensory experiences can be identified across languages and even
phyla. Many African languages have ideophones describing comparable
experiences, for example, the different noises made by objects falling
on the gorund.
- If so, then ideophones are crucial to a broader understanding of the
perceptual world implicit in African languages.
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- Samarin (1965, 1967, 1971)
is one of the few authors to give Niger-Congo ideophones a thorough
discussion. He has surveyed Bantu ideophones but has also explored the
wealth of ideophones in Gbaya, a Ubangian language.
- Other discussions can be
found in Evans-Pritchard (1962) for Zande, Courtenay (1976) for Yoruba,
Fivaz (1963) and Von Staden (1977) for Zulu, Fortune (1962) for Shona,
Nurse (1974) for Nyanja, Geunier (1978) for Malagasy, Hulstaert (1962)
for Mongo, Madugu (1987) for Nupe, Mamet (1978) for Ntomba, Noss (1975,
1986) for Gbaya, Uzechukwu (1980) for Igbo, Marivate (1985) for southern Bantu,
Mphande (1989), for Tumbuka, Kulumeka (1993, 1997) for Chewa.
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- A great deal less is
known about Nilo-Saharan and
Afroasiatic although Chadic languages are clearly as rich as their
Niger-Congo neighbours
- Although it is not entirely clear, dictionaries suggest that Afroasiatic
and Khoesan are less replete with ideophones and that it is interaction
with Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo that increases their repertoire
- This is curious since there
is no evidence of direct lexical borrowing; therefore it is essentially
borrowing of ideas about expressivity
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- An aspect of ideophones in
most African languages is reduplication; words are wholly or partly
reduplicated according to language-internal rules and it is often these
reduplications that give the onomatopoeic sense that plays some role in
their generation.
- Ideophones tend to be
polysyllabic and in some cases can be freely extended.
- However, the amount of
reduplication varies from language to language; in Kanuri, for example,
where reduplication is not a very common process in the language as a
whole, many ideophones are not of this form
- There is probably a very
general relationship between canonical structures of words in a language
and the form of ideophones
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- Ideophones are not usually
amenable to historical linguistics; their etymologies are generally
opaque and their is little cross-language regularity.
- One intriguing question
revolves around renewability and innovation. Do speakers constantly
invent new ideophones to suit changing environments?
- Does the pool of ideophones
constantly renew itself over time faster than the replacement rate of
ordinary lexemes?
- Speakers generally claim
that ideophones are a fixed pool and cannot be just ‘made
up’. The exception is imitations of sounds; for example new
technologies require new ideophones
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- A common claim in the
literature on ideophones in African languages is that these are
phonologically marked. They can contain unusual consonant phonemes (less
usually vowels) or sequences. They also more often contain glide tones
than the ordinary lexicon
- The labio-dental flap,
recently recognised by the IPA, is more common in many languages in
ideophones than in ordinary words. Indeed, its recognition depended on
the argument that it is common in ‘ordinary’ words in Mambay
- Courtenay (1976) argues that phonological markedness is the case in
Yoruba, as does Madugu’s (1987) for Nupe. This is certainly the
case for many of the southern African Bantu languages studied in detail,
where specific rules of reduplication and tone-patterns abound.
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- A claim frequently made in older literature is that ideophones can be
constructed by individual speakers to suit a particular speech-event and
have no language-wide validity.
- As far as this can be tested, there appears to be no validity for this
in the case of Tarok.
- Ideophones as defined here have a particular syntactic slot and cannot
be easily invented and understood.
- This is not to deny that individuals cannot imitate, sometimes
remarkably effectively, new auditory experiences. However, these are
regarded as outside the language system proper.
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- 1. They cannot be distinguished from adverbs morphologically or
syntactically
- 2. are not morphologically distinct from the main Tarok lexicon
- 3. have no unusual phonological properties
- 4. are not tonally distinct from similar non-ideophones
- 5. have etymologies that can only very rarely be discerned
- 6. constitute a fixed set of forms known to all competent speakers
- 7. Therefore, if they are to be distinguished as a word-type it is only
through semantics
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- 1. Many African languages also have ophresaesthemes, words to describe
very specific smells. A popular one in Nigeria/Cameroun is the
‘smell of fresh dogmeat’, admittedly not common in European
contexts.
- 2. These do not fill the same syntactic slot as ideophones and behave
more like invariant nouns. Nonetheless they appear to fill the same
experiential slot as ideophones.
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- 1. Across Central Nigeria, many Plateau and neighbouring languages have
what may be called ‘insultatives’
- 2. These are invariant adjectives that qualify particularly body parts
and are only used in insults.
- 3. They do not resemble ideophones morphologically in languages where
this is marked and do not show concord in languages where other
adjectives do.
- 4. Nonetheless, they otherwise appear to fall into the same experiential
class as ophesaesthemes etc.
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- Our knowledge of the extent
of ideophones in particular African languages is in part because their
recording reflects the worldview of the compiler of the lexicon.
- Our knowledge of their use
is often highly defective even for language where the lexical forms have
been documented because of the way we write grammars.
- It is clear that ideophones
can be phonotactically, morphologically or syntactically marked, but
this is not a necessary requirement
- It is probably better to
treat them as an ‘experiential’ class, some thing which
describes and intensifies the interaction with the sensory world
- and to acknowledge that
African languages at least also have other related word classes which
also remain in descriptive limbo
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