I keep forgetting the kind of simple edits that are so trivial to make in CSL styles. Here I catalogue a few, for my own benefit and hopefully also useful to others. The occasion is a festive one —one paper in press and another accepted with minor revisions!— and I'm not going to let the fun be spoiled by the tedious job of making minute changes to the referencing styles. Where did the editors and reviewers find all this time anyway? One carefully added spaces before the page numbers in all my in-text references! I refuse to do that by hand. Instead, I'm simply going to edit the nearest CSL style and woosh, the whole document will be fine.

The Zotero documentation offers the basic information on how to edit CSL styles and how to get your new style into Zotero; here I assume that you've read that. (The lowdown: use the reference test pane to see the XML code of an existing style. Make it your own. Save it under a different name. Drag it onto Firefox to add it to Zotero.) Before I give the code snippets, it is probably useful to briefly outline what a CSL style looks like so that the code looks less terrifying.

Basic anatomy of a CSL style

A CSL style is simply a file that you can edit in any text editor consisting of a number of different 'blocks' of information. The information is couched in terms of a relatively simple but powerful XML-based metalanguage called "Citation Style Language" or CSL for short.¹ Every CSL style basically looks as follows. First, an info block providing the metadata for the style (author, name, url, type); then a lot of macros defining the building blocks; a citation block that determines what citations look like in your document; and finally a bibliography block.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<style xmlns="http://purl.org/net/xbiblio/csl" class="in-text" xml:lang="en">
  <info>
	here goes the metadata
  </info>
	here go all the macros
  <citation>
	this block defines what a citation looks like
  </citation>
  <bibliography>
	this block defines what the bibliography looks like
  </bibliography>
</style>

Initials vs. full first names

Some styles have initials, others have full first names. Some of the first have initials followed by a period, others without. Personally, I think it is not the best thing to abbreviate information that is crucial for disambiguation, but this is what does it:

initialize-with="."

The above form gives you "Gombrich, E." Removing the period (i.e. having initialize-with="") gives you "Gombrich, E". Removing the option as a whole gives you "Gombrich, Ernst". Note that in some styles, this setting is included in several macros (e.g. editor as well as author) so you might have to adjust it in several places.

Multiple entries by the same author

Some well-known styles (for example the Chicago Manual of Style) substitute subsequent recurrences of an author with three em-dashes. The highlighted line below is what does it:

<bibliography>
      ...
    <option name="subsequent-author-substitute" value="———"/>
      ...
</bibliography>

If you don't want that happening, simply remove this option from the bibliography block.

Issue numbers

Some editors don't like issue numbers. In the Chicago style, the issue number comes out of the locators macro, and it is generated by the following line:

<text variable="issue" prefix=", no. "/>

Deleting that line gets rid of the issue number.

Page number prefix for in-text citations

For page numbers in in-text citations, some styles want (Doe 2010:5), others (Doe 2010, 5) and yet others (Doe 2010: 5) (note the space before the page number in the latter case). This is controlled by the group delimiter in the citation block towards the end of the CSL style.

<citation>
      ...
      (basic options)
      ...
    <layout prefix="(" suffix=")" delimiter="; ">
      <group delimiter=": ">
      ...
      (contributors, date, locators)
      ...
      </group>
    </layout>
  </citation>

delimiter=": " yields (Doe 2010: 5), while delimiter=", " yields (Doe 2010, 5), etc.

Want more?

Do you want more information, or need to make further customizations? The Zotero documentation has a page giving a CSL syntax summary. The common options given on that page are probably most useful to start with. Also, Rintze Zelle has written a very nice CSL 1.0 primer. And don't forget you can always ask for help in the Zotero forums. Loads of volunteer supporters there know more about CSL than I do.

Footnotes

1. CSL has been developed by Bruce d'Arcus and is implemented in popular reference management tools like Zotero and Mendeley.

We've been working on this for quite some time, and we're excited to go live now: the L&C Field Manuals and Stimulus Materials. This is a website providing access to many of the field manuals produced over the years by the Language and Cognition Group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. As the front page explains:

This site contains a bonanza of material for the field elicitation of semantics and and the field collection of verbal behaviour. These are unique resources that have been compiled over nearly twenty years of investigation of under-studied languages by the Language & Cognition Group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. During this period we collectively pioneered the field of semantic typology.

Many entries from these manuals have been circulating informally for years and they have been used by field workers all over the globe. With this archive we offer a centralized, easy to use resource. We've started by making available the most recent couple of years. Over the coming months, we will be uploading older manuals and materials, but you can start by checking out the wealth of materials already there — from guidelines on Building a Corpus of Multimodal Interaction in your Field Site to our cross-cultural Synaesthesia Pilot, and from the recent Language of Perception project to the classic Put Project: The Cross-Linguistic Encoding of Placement Events.

Transient Languages & Cultures published a nice post by Peter Austin last month on the question of how much time it takes to transcribe linguistic data. Working under tight time constraints during some recent fieldtrips, I found one way to speed the process up. It still takes an awful lot of time, but here goes.

In my experience, two very important bottlenecks in transcription, especially of conversational material, are (1) initial recognition (what exactly was said?), and (2) writing it down (how quickly can this be written down in the orthography you have chosen?). In my field situation (a Siwu-speaking village in eastern Ghana with few literate and even fewer computer-literate people), I don't have someone (yet) who could do the actual transcribing, which is usually done directly in ELAN, so I am responsible for bottleneck #2 (getting it into the computer).

As regards the first bottleneck, for a native speaker it is much, much easier to 'hear' a fuller form of conversational speech than for a non-native speaker, so it makes sense to get that kind of help for bottleneck #1. Initially therefore, I would sit down with a consultant, play a conversation utterance by utterance (I would have done the segmentation in ELAN beforehand), and have the consultant repeat the speech while I wrote it down. For bottleneck #2 reasons this often meant replaying the same utterance multiple times. I soon realized that this was a waste of time for my consultant, who would patiently repeat two to four times what he already got right the very first time. Essentially I was using him as a tape recorder, rewinding and replaying his careful repetitions to make up for my deficiencies in short-term memory and typing speed! So here is what I did to speed up the process:

1. Presegment the conversation in utterances in ELAN.
2. Go through it a first time, utterance by utterance, and record the consultant's carefully pronounced repetition of each utterance.
3. Get the results of 2 (tens to hundreds of small audio files) onto the computer, batch rename them if needed (I always include at least date and speaker ID in the filename), and put them in a media library that allows quick and easy file selection and playback (I used WinAMP).
4. With that material in hand (essentially slurred and non-slurred versions of utterances) do a first rough transcription. No need to bother the consultant during this time-consuming process.
5. Mark all the problematic points and get back to the consultant for a final check.

During my last fieldtrip, my main consultant had to study a lot for his final exams. The above modus operandi turned out to be a win-win situation. He provided me with carefully pronounced utterances (we would get so good at this that we nearly achieved real-time speeds), and I provided him with a place to study in my improvised office on a shadowy compound. So after an initial intense recording session, he would spend the afternoon learning while I would put my headphones on to do the first transcription, which was a breeze with his crystal-clear repetions (which included whistled tone patterns if needed!). Hours later, the final check would be a matter of minutes and we would be ready to enjoy our well-earned fufu in palmnut soup with goat meat — surely the best part of the whole transcription process!

Now online: SemiotiX New Series, an e-journal in semiotics. SemiotiX Bulletin has been around for several years, in hand-edited HTML. Its reincarnation, SemiotiX New Series, runs on WordPress, automating all of the technical stuff so that the editors can spend their time writing and editing contributions. Geek alert: the rest of this post details some of the technical stuff behind the scenes. Feel free to skip!

Why WordPress?

WordPress handles the e-journal format effortlessly. It's a breeze to include RSS feeds, organization by sections like 'editorial' and 'review', automatic archives of past issues, pages for static content, dynamic content areas that can be used for announcements, an interactive comment section, and nice thumbnails for articles. Search engines love WordPress, so the articles are easily findable.

The only slightly more complicated issue is how to do per-issue publishing in WordPress. By default, WordPress assumes a post-centered, chronological format (basically a timeline with dots representing individual posts). An e-journal however is issue-centered: clusters of posts published together periodically. The chronology of the posts within an issue doesn't really interest us; in fact, we want to be able to reorder posts at will. The best solution, both from a design and code point of view, is to explicitly recognize this difference in ontology using hierarchical categories. In the SemiotiX case, all individual issue categories are subcategories of ‘Issues’, and all content categories are subcategories of ‘Sections’. This is easy to get for end-users, and it is easy to code for developers. With that basic bifurcation in hand, we can easily get the front page to display all posts from the latest issue rather than the 10 latest posts regardless of category (the default setting). A simple category test (snippet 1 below) makes it possible to handle archives differently depending on whether people are looking at an issue or a content category.

Flexibility through theme functions

What I like most about the SemiotiX implementation is that there are no hardcoded category ID’s anywhere in the theme; all relevant ID's are pulled out from settings on a separate Publishing page, which is itself generated by a theme functions file (functions.php). The latest issue is chosen from a drop-down menu on the Publishing page. Defaults are put in place by retrieving the main category names (‘Issues’ and ‘Sections’) directly from the database, so it will work out of the box in a new setup. Drop-down lists show the existing parent categories so that other terms can be used if needed (e.g. Volumes vs. Topics), so the user never has to worry about finding category ID’s. A dedicated Dashboard widget displays vital information on the dashboard (snippet 2 below).

But how do we order the posts? Well, it turns out the orderby=menuorder feature also works with posts, contrary to what the WordPress docs say! This means that we can use a plugin like postMash to reorder the articles in an issue at will. Issue archives display the posts neatly by menu_order, while section archives and search result pages order the posts chronologically (snippet 1 again). An admin hook allows us to display a direct link to an ordering page on individual category pages (snippet 3).

The new SemiotiX also takes advantage of the built-in support for post thumbnails, making it very easy for editors to upload an image and use it as a thumbnail for display on the frontpage (snippet 4). Different sizes are generated automatically on the server, so there is no need anymore to use complex and error-prone plugins like Post Thumb Revisited and TimThumb. Finally, some unneeded options can be pruned from the visual editor using another snippet of code in functions.php (snippet 5).

Code snippets

All of these go into functions.php.

1. Test whether we're on an issue or a section archive

        		<?php if (is_category()) {
				// If this is a category archive
				// Are we looking at an 'Issues' or a 'sections' subcategory?
				  $cat = get_query_var('cat');
				  $args = array(
					'include' => $cat,
					  'hide_empty' => 0
					  );
				  $categories = get_categories($args);
				  if ( ($cat == $sections_cat) || ($categories[0]->category_parent == $sections_cat) ) {
					$archive_type = 'section' ;
				  } elseif ( ($cat == $issues_cat) || ($categories[0]->category_parent == $issues_cat) )  {
				  	$archive_type = 'issue' ;

				// For Issue archives, let's order posts by menu_order
					global $query_string;
					query_posts($query_string . "&order=ASC&orderby=menu_order");
				}

				?>

2. Display a widget on the Dashboard

// Setting and printing the widget content
function semiotix_dashboard_content() {

	global $custom_settings;
	$custom_settings = get_custom_settings();
	$current_issue_id = $custom_settings["current_issue"] ;
	$current_issue_name = get_cat_name( $current_issue_id );
	$cat = get_category($current_issue_id);
	$numarticles = $cat->category_count ;

	?>

    <p>Currently live: <?php echo '<strong>'.$current_issue_name.'</strong>, with '.$numarticles ; ?> articles (<a href="<?php bloginfo('wpurl') ; ?>/wp-admin/admin.php?page=<?php echo __FILE__ ; ?>">change here</a>)</p>
    <?php
} 

// Create the widget
function semiotix_dashboard_setup() {
	wp_add_dashboard_widget('semiotix_dashboard', 'Publishing', 'semiotix_dashboard_content', 'semiotix_dashboard_options');
}

// Add the widget to the dashboard
add_action('wp_dashboard_setup', 'semiotix_dashboard_setup' );

3. Add an Admin hook for postMash

if(function_exists(postMash_getPages) ) {
// Add the action to the hook
add_action ( 'edit_category_form', 'post_order_link');

// Define the function
function post_order_link($category) {

	$cat_ID = (int) $_GET['cat_ID'];
	$cat_name = get_cat_name($cat_ID);

	?>

	<h2>Article order (<?php echo $cat_name; ?>) </h2>
	<a href="<?php echo bloginfo(wpurl)."/wp-admin/edit.php?page=postmash-filtered%2FpostMash.php&m=0&cat=".$cat_ID ;?>">Order the articles in this category</a>

	<?php
	}
}

4. Add theme support for thumbnails

// Add theme support for thumbnails
add_theme_support( 'post-thumbnails' );
set_post_thumbnail_size( 48, 48, true ); // 48 pixels wide by 48 pixels tall, hard crop mode
// Define several thumbnail sizes
add_image_size( '48x48-square', 48, 48, true );
add_image_size( 'featured-image', 100, 100 );

5. Prune the 'format' dropdown options in the visual editor

// Get rid of some option bloat in TinyMCE
function change_mce_options( $init ) {
 $init['theme_advanced_blockformats'] = 'p,h2,h3,blockquote';
 $init['theme_advanced_disable'] = 'forecolor';
 return $init;
}
add_filter('tiny_mce_before_init', 'change_mce_options');

One of my projects here at The Ideophone has been to track down early sources on ideophonic phenomena. For example, I have suggested that we may call the 1850's the decade of the discovery of ideophones in African linguistics. But we can push back the linguistic discovery of ideophones a little further by looking to other traditions. Today we look at Japanese, for which I have found some early 17th century grammatical treatises that offer information on ideophones (nowadays called 'mimetics' in Japanese linguistics).¹

Back then, it was not very clear to Western grammarians that imitative words could imitate anything besides sound, and therefore our first source, Diego Collado's Ars grammaticae Iaponicae linguae, calls them "adverbia sonus" (it would be interesting to know whether Japanese words for the category itself —like giongo/gitaigo— already existed back then). Here's an excerpt from Collado 1632:

Aduerbia concludendi, & aduertendi

Aduerbia sonus sunt multiplicia secundum diuersitatem quam Iapones in sonus terminatione percipiunt, & illis, to, solent postponere: v.g. ua ua to xite, vociferando dicentes, ua ua, & si illis postponitur meqi, u, significat talem strepitum facere: v.g. ua meqi, u, va dicendo vociferor, aris, &c.

Adverbs that conclude and claim attention

The adverbs of sound (adverbia sonus) are many and vary in accordance with the way that the Japanese perceive the sound. The particle to is added to them; e.g., va va to xite 'vociferously saying wa wa,' and if they add meqi,u, it means to make even a louder noise; e.g., va meqi,u 'to shout saying wa.' [transl. by Richard Spear 1975]

According to Kimi Akita, who has kindly helped me to identify these constructions, the particle to can be identified with the quotative particle or complementizer, used in contemporary Japanese to introduce reported speech and adverbial ideophones. Collado's first example can thus be glossed as follows:

waawaa-to it-te

IDPH.bark-QUOT say-CONJUNCTIVE

'saying waawaa'

What Collado transcribes as 'meqi,u' can probably be identified with the verbalizer '-meku' which (according to Kimi Akita) is less productive nowadays. Kimi provides some interesting examples of lexicalized verbs derived from ideophones using this suffix:

(1) mimetic: kira-meku 'twinkle' (< kirakira), zawa-meku 'hum' (< zawazawa), hira-meku 'be inspired' (?< hirahira)
(2) nonmimetic (rare): haru-meku 'get like spring' (< haru 'spring'), huru-meku 'get old' (< huru-i 'old'), nazo-meku 'look mysterious' (< nazo 'mystery') [Kimi Akita p.c.]

Attaching this suffix to a monomoraic root like 'wa' is not allowed in Modern Japanese, notes Kimi.

Landresse 1825 [based on Rodrigues 1604]

But there is a fragment that is more interesting and that takes us even further back; it is found in Rodrigues's Arte da lingoa de Iapam. I have not been able to consult the original and am relying on an abridged French version published by Landresse in 1825. Here is what it has to say:

§81. Les Japonais ont un grand nombre d'adverbes dont ils se servent non-seulement pour exprimer les modifications d'une action, mais qui indiquent encore le son, le bruit, la position de la chose. (...) On forme encore un grand nombre d'adverbes par la répétition du même mot, pour exprimer la manière dont se fait une chose, ou le son de cette chose : comme farafara, bruit de la pluie ou des larmes qui tombent. (p. 87)

[my translation:] §81. The Japanese have a great number of adverbs which serve not only to express the manner of an event, but which also indicate the sound, the noise, the position of the thing. (...) A great number of these adverbs are formed by repetition of the same word, to express the manner in which a thing is done, or the sound of the thing : like farafara, 'sound of rain or of falling tears'

Here, we actually have a somewhat broader conception of the class — these adverbs are not mere imitations of sounds, they also express positions and manners. Moreover, we have a first morphological observation: many of them are reduplicated. Not all, mind you; most ideophone inventories known today do include a great deal of reduplicated words, but there are also plenty of morphologically simple roots. Incidentally, we've seen examples of both types before in the artful renditions of Kisi ideophones by Joanna Taylor: bákàlà-bákàlà 'the sound of big, fat raindrops' and bíààà 'rain softly falling'.

References

1. Collado, Diego. 1632. Ars grammaticae Iaponicae linguae. [Project Gutenberg e-text]
2. Spear, Richard L. 1975. Diego Collado's grammar of the Japanese language. Center for East Asian Studies, University of Kansas.
3. Rodrigues, João. 1825[1604]. Élémens de la grammaire japonaise [abridged from Arte da lingoa de Iapam] tr. et collationnés par C. Landresse. [With]. Trans. C. Landresse.

Footnotes

1. I'm pretty sure there will be Japanese sources that go back even further, and offer more detail. Let me know if you have any!

Finally, some commentaries on the Evans & Levinson paper are trickling down the blogosphere. Nigel Duffield's "Roll up for the mystery tour" is one. Unfortunately, the comments on that post are closed. I have a question, so let me just post it here, where the comments are open.

The commentary is entertainingly written. Basically, it agrees with E&L's rallying cry for the need to describe and recognize diversity; but it argues that, due to certain misconceptions about UG on the part of E&L, "Universal Grammar ... walks free from the courtroom." The first point that E&L get wrong about UG according to Duffield is the status of the notion 'subject'. He has an interesting quote from McCloskey to support this point; and he also points out that, ironically, the topic/agent/pivot distinction championed by E&L is in fact 'commonly accepted, if differently formalized' in (some) UG quarters.

But it is really the second point, about the ontology of UG, that piqued my interest. Duffield argues that "UG is a theory of the initial state, which Chomsky now terms FL (Faculty of Language), not of any particular endstate grammar (LEnglish, LJiwarli, LPiraha, etc.,)." But that is not all; he adds, "The problem is not merely that UG is not claimed to be a property of final state grammars, but that it need not even be definitional of these grammars." (emphasis mine, MD). And then comes the crucial point, for me as well as for Duffield:

the crucial point here is that facts about attained, endstate grammars bear only tangentially on theories of UG. Baldly stated, the absence of Language Universals—granting for the sake of argument that these are a ‘myth’—does not imply the absence of UG.

To be honest, this baffled me. Not so much because I disagree, but rather because there is so little left to agree or disagree with! I have wondered before (in an admittedly tongue-in-cheek post on the 'grammar of the gaps') about the gradual shift of UG to evermore abstract territories — compare for example the switch-like parameters of the Principles & Parameters approach (some of which clearly refer to concrete (endstate) grammatical phenomena) with the most recent claims that recursion and some form of Merge should be sufficient for the FLN (Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch 2002). Duffield himself quotes Chomsky to the effect that 'It is a coherent and perhaps correct proposal that the language faculty constructs a grammar only in conjunction with other faculties of mind.' (Chomsky 1975:41). In my earlier post, I mention the question posed to Adele Goldberg by Jan-Wouter Zwart at the Nijmegen Lectures 2007. Zwart, in search of common ground between generative grammar and construction grammar, asked 'Is it conceivable that underlying the structure of constructions are abstract principles of a simple kind, rooted in universal properties of human cognition?' Goldberg's answer was affirmative — but as I note in my discussion, the statement is sufficiently general to engender agreement from almost everyone.

But is it grammar?

The big question such abstract conceptions of UG raise for me is this: but is it grammar? That is, if it is indeed the case, as Duffield holds, that UG is not a property of endstate grammars; that it is not even definitional of these grammars; and moreover that 'attained, endstate grammars bear only tangentially on UG', what exactly is UG supposed to be, how do we go about empirically validating the UG hypothesis, and why are we calling it "universal grammar"?

My worry goes deeper than the apparent misnomer (though I do wonder whether the theory is not in need of a new name, if 'endstate' grammars have so little to do with it; but then I'm probably overlooking useful connotations of 'grammar' for the initial state). I find it difficult to see (1) how such an abstract concept could be isolated from more general cognitive abilities, and (2) why one would want to isolate it a priori. To isolate it —i.e. to show that UG is the 'language faculty' in some relevant sense— would one not need to show that its core business is language? (But how would one go about that if it doesn't necessarily show in 'endstate' grammars?) And would one not need to show, conversely, that more general cognitive abilities cannot take care of language — in other words, that UG is necessary to explain (aspects of) language usage and language structure?

Excavating UG

A final issue, prodded by another statement from Duffield's commentary:

No matter how deep one digs into mature grammatical systems, there is no logical reason to expect that one will excavate UG in any recognizable form, any more than one should discover universal principles of embryology through an in-depth study of mature organisms.

This does raise the question of what linguistics as a science is looking at. Following the analogy here (which is always a dangerous thing to do, but then, it is perhaps a dangerous analogy), Duffield seems to say that UG is to language structure what universal principles of embryology are to mature organisms. That would imply that UG is not about language structure (since digging into language structure is not going to yield UG 'in any recognizable form') but about the early ontogenesis of language in acquisition. I would agree that acquisition is of central importance (though again, I don't see why we shouldn't try and see how far we get with (1) domain-general cognitive abilities and (2) a socially grounded approach, before assuming there has to be a non-trivial 'language organ'). But what of the flood of generativist literature that does dig deep into 'mature grammatical systems', purporting to learn things about UG (presumably in recognizable form)? Does this literature bear more than a tangential relation to the notion of UG espoused here?

Now, I expect there are interesting answers to these questions. No doubt I have overlooked some important ramifications, and perhaps I, too, have mistaken the ontology of UG. If so, set me straight! Comments are open.

References

1. Chomsky, Noam. 1975. Reflections on Language. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books.
2. Evans, Nicholas, and Stephen C. Levinson. 2009. The Myth of Language Universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32: 429-492. DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X0999094X
3. Hauser, Marc D., Noam Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch. 2002. The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve. Science 298: 1569-1579.

High time for a new issue of 'Ideophones around the web'. First, the ultimately blend of ideophone and idiophone: Nick Cave's sound suits. Then, in English pop culture, the non-identity of ideophones and onomatopoeia is finally registering, thanks to bling. And finally, some word tasting notes on squee from Sesquiotica.

Sound Suits

One of the many sound suits by Nick Cave

Fiber-textile artist Nick Cave (once a professional dancer) makes fullbody "sound suits" from mixed materials (metal, fabric, buttons, hair, etc.) that make all sorts of noises when they're worn. They are the perfect blend of idiophone (self-sounding) and ideophone (idea-sounding) art. Art blog Beautiful/Decay features an interview with the artist.

Ideophones in pop culture

That rap makes for cutting-edge linguistic innovations isn't news — but who would've thought it would help to tear down the single most common misconception about ideophones? And yet it does, through the word bling. The thing with bling is that its not imitative of sound (its meaning is essentially visual, referring to the dazzling reflection of light), but that people still feel that the form fits the meaning very well.¹ So people seem to feel that it's not onomatopoeic and look for a better term. Who was the first calling it an ideophone I don't know, but the Wikipedia entry does, and it is trickling down into popular media like Rolling Stone magazine:

Lil Wayne applied such lyrical impressionism to the crew's stock rims-and-grills material that he ended up coining a linguistic oddity known as an "ideophone": a word meant to convey a visual effect through an imaginary sound. In this case, that of light bouncing — or "blinging," if you will — off precious gems or metals.

Squee

Another recent coinage in pop culture is squee. James Harbeck's Sesquiotica has a very nice post about squee in the series "word tasting notes". Excerpt:

“Squee is a noise fangirls make,” Daryl said. “You know, anime fangirls, so excitable. It started out as onomatopoeia –” (“An ideophone,” Jess interjected) –”and has become a verb and a noun and probably an adjective too somewhere.” Ah, yes, the versatility of the English language — and of ideophones, which are words that have a performative aspect to them, like lickety-split, whoosh, and so on.

Actually, the whole of Sesquiotica is worth checking out — a place to go if you want to savour some words. I added it to the Ideophone blogroll. From the about page:

Words are delicious and intoxicating. They do much more than just denote; they have appearance, sound, a feel in the mouth, and words they sound like and travel with. All of these participate in the aesthetic experience of the word and can affect communication. So why not taste them like a fine wine?

Exactly. For some word tasting notes on Siwu ideophones, check out my Ideophone proeverij posts.

Footnotes

1. It might have started out as onomatopoeic of course — the sound of jewellery 'tinkling'? Also, to really align with the English visual phonesthemes, it would've been better if it started with gl-.

Found this gem in a review of Paul de Wolf's (1971) The Noun Class System of Proto-Benue-Congo:

This work falls within the 'clay tablet' tradition of African comparative linguistics, and, like other things in the same tradition (Meinhof, Greenberg), it has the properties of being inscrutable and yet at the same time, in broad outline, convincing. The two together make an infuriating whole. (Kelly 1973:716)

Kelly goes on to list some good things and some major problems about the book; unfortunately, the problems are much bigger than the good things in his opinion. His final paragraph is also worth quoting for the subtle (and not so subtle) critique ingeniously giftwrapped in a counterfactual:

Anyone interested in African comparative linguistics need not regret 50 shillings spent on this monograph, which represents a good deal of painstaking work, more than actually appears between the covers. Used in conjunction with the previous publications of the Benue Congo section of the West African Linguistic Society, it provides a mass of data together with some attempt at a historical overview. But the price is not, alas, 50 shillings. It is £7.55 at this time of writing.

References

1. De Wolf, Paul P. 1971. The Noun Class System of Proto-Benue-Congo. The Hague: Mouton.
2. Kelly, John. 1973. Review of The Noun Class System of Proto-Benue-Congo. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 36(3). 716-718.

Language in Society just published a book note by me on the second edition of Deborah Tannen's well-known book Talking Voices. Here is the pdf.

In the review I am slightly critical of this classic for three reasons. First of all, for a second edition of a work that appeared two decades ago, it is very thin on updates and revisions. Secondly, it still focuses on the acoustic signal only (thereby overlooking a wealth of work on gesture and multimodal interaction that appeared since the first edition). Third, despite its general claims, Talking Voices limits itself mainly to various Anglophone ways of speaking (excepting some Greek examples). The Greek examples (which derive from an interesting 1983 paper) actually point to the relevance of a widespread linguistic resource that happens not to be very common in either the Greek or the Anglophone cultures discussed: ideophony. I argue that ideophones are immediately relevant to 'repetition, dialogue, and imagery' (the subtitle of TV), and thus to core themes of Tannen's work (see also Nuckolls 1992, 1996).

Here is the conclusion:

The strength of Tannen’s book lies in its insightful analysis of the auditory side of conversation. Yet talking voices have always been embedded in richly contextualized multimodal speech events. As spontaneous and pervasive involvement strategies, both iconic gestures and ideophones should be of central importance to the analysis of conversational discourse. Unfortunately, someone who picks up this second edition is pretty much left in the dark about the prevalence of these phenomena in everyday face-to-face interaction all over the world.

Should Tannen have looked at gesture and ideophones? Of course every researcher has to make general choices and every published piece of scientific work is by definition incomplete. So I don't think there's an issue of 'should have' — but I do think it is unfortunate for the 2nd edition to miss out on these phenomena, because they would have offered many interesting and helpful illustrations of the book's themes.

References

1. Dingemanse, Mark. 2010. Review of on Tannen, Deborah, Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse (2nd ed.). Language in Society, 39, 1, 139-140.
2. Nuckolls, Janis B. 1992. Sound Symbolic Involvement. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2, no. 1: 51-80.
3. Nuckolls, Janis B. 1996. Sounds Like Life: Sound-Symbolic Grammar, Performance, and Cognition in Pastaza Quechua. New York: Oxford University Press.
4. Tannen, Deborah. 1983. "I Take Out the Rock-Dok!": How Greek Women Tell about Being Molested (and Create Involvement). Anthropological Linguistics 25, no. 3: 359-374.
5. Tannen, Deborah. 2007. Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. 2nd ed. Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 25. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The Basque word for their language is Euskara or Euskera, earlier Heuskara. The first part of this word is the Togo R. word for "Akpafu", Likpe be-fu "Akpafu", Bowili o-vu-ne "Akpafumann", Santrokofi o-fu "Akpafumann", Akpafu ka-wu, ka-'u "Akpafu". The early initial Basque h is from k, as can be seen from ka-wu, ka'u. The a has changed to e in this lexeme. The consonant between e and u has been lost. Basque lacks the semivowel w, which drops out here in Akpafu ka'u. See Lafon (1960 : 92) for confirmation from placenames etc.: Ausci, Aoiz, Auch.

The second part of the word, ka or ke is a word for "speak", Niger-Congo gue "voice, language", Ewe, Ga gbe "voice", Agni guere "language, speech", Yoruba i-gbe "loud cry", Gbari e-gwe, e-gbe "mouth". The e is for original a in this word. Niger-Congo e is secondary. Compare Niger-Congo ka, ke, k'e "to speak", which is related. The final sylable -ra is the Niger-Congo article. No clearer proof could be found that the Basques were originally the Akpafu!

Thus says mr. GJK Campbell-Dunn "M.A. (NZ), M.A. (Camb.) Ph.D." in a most interesting document titled "Basque as Niger-Congo". (Just to remind you, Akpafu is another name for Siwu, the language I've been doing fieldwork on over the last three years.) I mentioned this story over a year ago in the comments of an excellent post over at Glossographia titled Debunking and de-Basque-ing, but I never got around to posting about it here. In his post, Stephen Chrisomalis notes that "There is probably no culture or language that has attracted more pseudoscientific attention than Basque."

I'm not intent on debunking Campbell-Dunn's story here; I think the quotation above stands just fine on its own. But I do want to draw attention to the irony of this particular case. There you are, author of such groundbreaking works as The African Origins of Classical Civilisation, Maori: The African Evidence, and Who were the Minoans?: an African answer. You now want to solve the Basque enigma once and for all, and since the general thrust of your work is to link everything to Africa one way or another you set out to discover that Basque is in fact a Niger-Congo language. A look at the rich lexical material in Westermann (1927) provides ample inspiration. Let's pick one of the Togo Remnant Languages, you think — after all, Basque is sort of remnant too. Akpafu. Euskara. Hey, why not. Let's just see what we can do... no-one's going to notice, right?

Well, I noticed. And I just want to say it loud and clear: Graham Campbell-Dunn's work is crackpot science. Don't believe it; don't even read it. Siwu and Euskara are fascinating languages that deserve of serious research. But they are most certainly not related. Although... come closer, I have to tell you a secret...

[[Visit blog to check out this spoiler]]

References

1. Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide. 2006. Sound Symbolism and Motion in Basque. Lincom Europa.
2. Westermann, Diedrich. 1927. Die Westlichen Sudansprachen Und Ihre Beziehungen Zum Bantu. Berlin: In kommission bei W. de Gruyter & co.