Word of the Week: Ideophone

Ideophone (ID-ee-oh-phone): A word, often onomatopoeic and sometimes involving reduplication, that vividly represents a sensation or sensory perception. English-language examples include bling-bling (glitter, sparkle) and gobble. This Wikipedia article gives examples in other languages, such as Navajo k'az k'az (the sound of shearing sheep).

"The Ideophone" is the name of a blog written by Mark Dingemanse, a PhD student in language and cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in The Netherlands. Here is Mark's post on the history of the term "ideophone," which concludes with an example from Siwu, a Niger-Congo language spoken in eastern Ghana:

It may not be the most tasteful one, but I’m sure it will give you a good idea of what expressives are about. The expressive is sàsàsàsàsà, and in my database it is glossed as ‘spontaneous outcoming of urine’:

gɔ yukukpe ɔpia mɛ̀ ɔ̀tu i kanya, kùru lotsɛ mɛ̀ ìbɔrɛ sàsàsàsàsàsà
when thief he-put me gun in mouth, urine it-give me outcoming EXPR
‘When the robber put a gun into my mouth, I started urinating sàsàsàsàsàsà‘ (lit. urine gave me outcoming ~)

Comments

[The Ideophone]

Thanks for the mention — pleasantly surprised!