- Using distinctions made by Roger Brown (in Words and Things [Glencoe, Ill., 1958], p. 307), Willard Walker defines expressive meaning in similar terms: “Expressive meaning is definable as that part of meaning which serves to categorize the speaker; it is often communicated by signals which the speaker does not control, or of which he is for the most part unaware.” (“Taxonomic Structure and the Pursuit of Meaning,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, XII [1965], 266.)
- It will be made clear below why the words from other languages are compared with African ideophones.
- Clement M. Doke, Bantu Linguistic Terminology (London, 1935), p. 118. Care must be exercised in distinguishing the word ideophone from idiophone, which refers to a class of musical instruments. Doke's ideophone, which the spelling makes clear, includes the combining form of the word idea.
- William J. Samarin, The Gbeya Language (Berkeley, Calif., 1966).
- Cf. William J. Samarin, “Perspective on African Ideophones,” African Studies, XXIV (1965), 117–121.
- C. M. Doke and B. W. Vilakazi, Zulu-English Dictionary, 2nd ed., rev. with addendum (Johannesburg, 1958). See also Derek Fivaz, Some Aspects of the Ideophone in Zulu (M.A. thesis, Hartford Seminary Foundation; Hartford Studies in Linguistics No. 4, 1963).
- But a beginning has been made in this direction. See p. 153 for references to studies by the present writer.
- William J. Samarin, “Determining the Meanings of Ideophones,” Journal of West African Languages, IV (1967), 35–41.
- For example, languages might be classified according to the part of speech in which the ideophones are found, by the size of the ideophonic lexicon, by derivational processes (from verbs, etc.), by their distribution in sentences (i.e., their syntax), by the amount of information they contribute to a sentence, and so on.
- Compare the adoption of ideophones by these creoles with their loss in the speech of urbanized (detribalized) Africans and in the indigenous African pidgins and creoles. There are few in Sango, practically none in Kituba. (Information about Kituba comes from Donald Deer, personal communication.)
- W. André A. Wilson, The Crioulo of Guiné (Johannesburg, 1962), p. 34.
- Ibid., p. 35.
- Kay Williamson, “Ideophones in Ijo” (paper read at the Fifth West African Languages Survey Congress, University of Ghana, April 5–9, 1965).
- Margaret M. Green and G. E. Igwe, A Descriptive Grammar of Igbo (London, 1963).
- We would welcome observations in spite of the difficulty of verifying their accuracy, for all observations constitute data. Out of a set of impressions and feelings about how words are used and what their connotations appear to be might come significant contributions to a sociolinguistic or psycholinguistic understanding of expressive speech. Therefore, we should record the observation of one fieldworker who reports that echo- words in Assamese seem to be used by women and children more than by men, that they are characteristic of colloquial usage, and that they can be expected to occur in humorous stories. She admits that because of her sex, she had more dealings with Assamese women and children than with men, but the feeling remains strong that men use echo-words less than the other groups.
- Samuel E. Martin, “Phonetic Symbolism in Korean,” American Studies in Altaic Linguistics, ed. Nicholas Poppe, Indiana University Publications, Uralic and Altaic Series, Vol. 13 (Bloomington, Ind., 1962), 177–189.
- F. W. Householder, Jr., “Azerbaijani Onomatopes,” American Studies in Altaic Linguistics, Vol. 13 (1962), 115–121.
- Solange Bernard-Thierry, “Les onomatopées en Malgache,” Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris, L (1961), 240–269.
- William A. Smalley, Outline of Khmu? Structure (New Haven, 1961).
- John D. Miller, “Word Classes in Brô,” Mon-Khmer Studies I (Saigon, 1964), pp. 41–62.
- Elizabeth M. Banker, “Bahnar Reduplication,” Mon-Khmer Studies I (Saigon, 1964), pp. 119–134.
- Richard Watson, Reduplication in Pacoh (M.A. thesis, Hartford Seminary Foundation, 1966).
- Lili Rabel, Khasi, A Language of Assam (Baton Rouge, 1961).
- Ibid., p. 63.
- A. H. Arden, A Progressive Grammar of Common Tamil, 5th ed., 2nd impression, rev. A. C. Clayton (Madras, 1954). I am indebted to H. A. Gleason, Jr., for this Tamil reference.
- Stanley S. Newman, “Linguistic Aspects of Yokuts Style” (1940), reprinted in Language in Culture and Society, ed. Dell Hymes (New York, 1964), pp. 372–377.
- Eugene A. Nida, Toward a Science of Translating (Leiden, 1964), p. 169.
- That is, classes of words whose selection is frequently correlated with expressive as well as referential meaning. It would be possible to admit the existence of such a class even though some of its members were associated with more prosaic speech. That there are frozen or dead metaphors, for example, does not require the rejection of all metaphors.
- see Jacqueline Thomas, Le Parler Ngbaka de Bokanga (The Hague, 1963) and rev. by William J. Samarin, Journal of African Languages, IV (1965), 231–234.
- For a valuable contribution to the cross-linguistic function of reduplication, see Harold Key, “Some Semantic Functions of Reduplication in Various Languages,” Anthropological Linguistics, V, No. 3 (1965), 88–102.
- Others have called attention to them in one connection or another. George V. Smithers, for example, uses the concept of ideophony to explain some anomalous forms in English: “It should be clear that wrabbe, wrobbe and wragge are synonymous variants; that the double consonants of wrabbe, wrobbe, at least, are of expressive origin (as we learn from -b- attested in vravla); that wrabbe, wrobbe exhibit the ideophonic apophony; and that all three words are ideophones.” (Archivum Linguisticum, VI [1954], 194.) See also Nils Thun, Reduplicative Words in English: A Study of Formations of the Types tick-tock, hurly-burly, and shilly-shally (Uppsala, 1963).
- Newman, p. 375.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- it is significant also that non-African speakers of African languages, even those who have shown a very high proficiency in both understanding and speaking, very frequently fail to appreciate the importance of ideophones in these languages. Some even seem to be completely unaware of them. (Similarly, one competent Australian speaker of Bengali was recently interviewed about the use of echo-words in that language. In one-half hour of discussion he could think of only three examples, viz., habi jabi ‘mess’, mac tac ‘parade up and down’, and kapor capor ‘clothes and stuff’.) It would be enlightening to attempt an explanation of this failure in mastering another linguistic structure. It is not enough to suggest that a foreigner pidginizes the target language because of his concern with referential meaning. If it could be demonstrated that the meanings carried by ideophones were in some measure redundant, their omission would be understandable. But in at least some languages, their contribution to the total meaning of a sentence is important. In Xhosa, for example, one can make ideophonic equivalents of normal sentences; that is, an ideophonic utterance can summarize a “discursive” one. It is tempting to suggest that the learner filters out the ideophones because of the incommensurability of his own expressive system with that of the other society. This hypothesis finds substantiation in the view that most efficient language learning (I am speaking of a hearing-speaking mastery) is correlated with empathy with the other party.
- Wolf Leslau, Ethiopian Argots (The Hague, 1964).
- Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (London, 1922), p. 452.
- Ibid., p. 446.
- Paul L. Garvin and Madeleine Mathiot, “The Urbanization of the Guarani Language—A Problem in Language and Culture,” in Men and Cultures: Selected Papers of the Fifth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, Philadelphia, September 1–9, 1956, ed. Anthony F. C. Wallace (Philadelphia, 1960), pp. 783–790; p. 787 cited.
- Martin, p. 177.
- Harold C. Conklin, “Linguistic Play in Its Cultural Context” (1959), reprinted in Hymes, Language in Culture and Society, pp. 295–300.
- Wolf Leslau, “Echo-words in Ethiopic,” Annales d'Ethiopie, IV (1961), 205–238.
- Suhas Chatterjee, A Study of the Relationship Between Written and Colloquial Bengali (Ph.D. dissertation, Hartford Seminary Foundation, 1962); see p. 134.
- Information from Grace Jolly, personal communication.
- Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (New York, 1941), p. 9.
- It is significant that the linguistic virtuosity of speakers of “dialect” where there are standard languages is also widely held. In this way is explained the multiplicity of terms that one finds in regional dialects.
- Compare the statement made by Rulon Wells about the importance of the study of the playful uses of language. (The Common Feature Method [New Haven, 1961] pp. xi–xii.)
- Since there is an obvious difference in the linguistic function of ideophones in African languages, we should be able to draw significant conclusions concerning the history of the Atlantic Pidgins if we found that there were parallel differences in these languages. A clear demonstration that the ideophonic pattern of, say, Haitian is more like that of Kikongo than Sranan's is would be very important in ascertaining the history of these languages, especially in view of the theory which holds that all of these Atlantic Pidgins are derived from a form of Pidgin Portuguese by a process of relexification. Compare the statement of Stewart: “it is interesting to note that in Creoles certain kinds of lexical items tend to be associated more with the grammar than with the vocabulary, insofar as historical derivation is concerned. These include grammatical morphemes such as prepositions, verbal particles, and some pronouns. Also behaving this way are certain types of symbolic behavior which are marginal to language, such as vocal qualifiers and ideophones.” (William A. Stewart, “Creole Languages in the Caribbean,” in Study of the Role of Second Languages in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, ed. Frank A. Rice [Washington, D.C., 1962], p. 53.)
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