IDEOPHONES WORLDWIDE
nIt 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.
n 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)
nThis 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
nIdeophones
(or ‘expressives’ in Asian terminology) have begun to be of more interest to the broader
scholarly community
(e.g. Hinton et al, 1994).