IDEOPHONES in africa
n 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.
n Ideophones tend to be polysyllabic and
in some cases can be freely extended.
n 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
n There is probably a very general
relationship between canonical
structures of words in a language and the form of ideophones