Sounding out ideas on language, interaction, and iconicity

Mark Dingemanse

Social robots as depictions of social agents

Clark &amp; Fischer propose that people see social robots as interactive depictions and that this explains some aspects of people’s behaviour towards them. We agree with C&amp;F’s conclusion that we don’t need a novel ontological category for these social artefacts and that they can be seen as intersecting with a lineage of depictions from Michelangelo’s David to Mattel’s talking barbie doll. We have two constructive contributions to make.

How robots become social: A comment on Clark &amp; Fischer

Sketches, visualizations and other forms of externalizing cognition play a prominent role in the work of just about any scientist. It’s why we love using blackboards, whiteboards, notebooks and scraps of paper. Many folks who had the privilege of working the late Pieter Muysken fondly remember his habit of grabbing any old piece of paper that came to hand, scribbling while talking, then handing it over to you.

Thinking visually with Remarkable

I have other things to do but one day I’ll enlarge on the insidious effects of elevating this cursed little histogram of “Research output per year” as the single most important bit of information about academics at thousands of universities that use Elsevier Pure. Consider this mini-rant my notes for that occasion. Most importantly, we DO NOT write per year. Our careers are too diverse and precarious to measure output that way.

A rant about Elsevier Pure

The closing paragraphs of my previous post were cited in several places (e.g. Culture Making, Far Outliers) as evidence of a cultural revival. Although I feel it is really too soon to say whether this is the case, I’m glad to report that the dirges that we recorded in Akpafu-Todzi are in wide circulation now and are even being played during funerals, to great acclaim.

A cultural revival?

Google Scholar is useful, but its inclusiveness and mix of automatically updated and hand-curated profiles means you should never take any of its numbers at face value. Case in point: the power couple Prof.

Summary:
 
 Google Scholar is useful, but its inclusiveness and mix of automatically updated and hand-curated profiles means you should never take any of its numbers at face value. Case in point: the power couple Prof.

Some things you need to know about Google Scholar

Today’s dish of expressive vocabulary is particularly tasty. It comes from G|ui, a Khoisan language of Botswana.

 1

To Africanists, expressive words from Khoisan languages are of special interest because Khoisan has been claimed on various occasions to lack ideophones, otherwise thought to be one of those linguistic traits that characterize Africa as a linguistic area (Meeussen 1975:3,

 2

Heine &amp;

Fresh wild melon and meat full of gravy: food texture verbs in G|ui (Khoisan)

Language makes us human. But there is an interesting asymmetry in our willingness to ascribe linguistic capacities to non-humans: animals are seen as having none, whereas computers may well master it according to many. What curious conception of language makes this asymmetry possible? And what do Descartes and Turing have to do with it? Notes from a new essay about language between animals and computers.

Language is what makes us human: one of those things, perhaps

 the

one thing, that sets us apart. But there is an interesting asymmetry in our willingness to ascribe linguistic capacities to non-humans: animals tend to be seen as having none, whereas computers are increasingly thought to have mastered language. This asymmetry is the focus of a recent essay I co-authored with a range of people, led by Marlou Rasenberg.

Language between animals and computers

The last time I blindly accepted an invitation to speak was in 2012, when I was invited to an exclusive round table on the future of linguistics at a renowned research institute. As a fresh postdoc I was honoured and bedazzled. When the programme was circulated, I got a friendly email from a colleague asking me how I’d ended up there, and whether I thought the future of linguistics was to be all male.

How to avoid all-male panels (manels)

This is a the second part in a two part series of peer commentary on a recent preprint. The first part is here. I ended that post by noting I wasn’t sure all preprint authors were aware of the public nature of the preprint. I am now assured they are, and have heard from the senior author that they are working on a revised version.

Pitfalls of fossil-thinking part II

A lot of our recent work revolves around working with conversational data, and one thing that’s struck me is that there are no easy ways to create compelling visualizations of conversation as it unfolds over time. The most common form seems to be pixelated screenshots of transcription software not made for this purpose.

Playing with R: unrolling conversation

The construction of gothic cathedrals like Chartres was governed not by blueprints but by “talk, tradition, and templates” — at least that is what Turnbull has compellingly argued. When you come across such a neatly alliterative triad, there are two ways you can go. You can adopt the terms in an unexamined way and rely on their alliterative power.

Reading Suchman’s classic

 Human-machine reconfigurations: plans and situated actions

, I am impressed by her description David Turnbull’s work on the construction of gothic cathedrals. In brief, the intriguing point is that no blueprints or technical drawings or even sketches are known to have existed for any of the early modern gothic cathedrals, like that of Chartres.

Talk, tradition, templates: a meta-note on building scientific arguments

There is a considerable halo-effect attached to JIFs, whereby an article that ends up in a high IF journal (whether by sheer brilliance or simply knowing the right editor, or both) is treated, unread, with a level of veneration normally reserved for Wunderkinder. Usually this is done by people totally oblivious to network effects, gatekeeping and institutional biases.

I’ve been caught up in a few debates recently about

 Recognition and Rewards

, a series of initiatives in the Netherlands to diversify the ways in which we recognize and reward talent in academia. One flashpoint was the publication of an open letter signed by ~170 senior scientists (mostly from medical and engineering professions), itself written in response to two developments.

Why article-level metrics are better than JIF if you value talent over privilege

Wikidata is an ambitious enterprise, but social ontologies are never language-agnostic — so the project risks perpetuating rather than transcending the worldviews most prevalent in current Wikipedia databases, which means broadly speaking global north, Anglo, western, white cishet male worldviews. I think Wikidata is perhaps promising for brute physical facts like the periodic table and biochemistry.

TL;DR

Wikidata is an ambitious enterprise, but social ontologies are never language-agnostic — so the project risks perpetuating rather than transcending the worldviews most prevalent in current Wikipedia databases, which means broadly speaking global north, Anglo, western, white cishet male worldviews. I think Wikidata is perhaps promising for brute physical facts like the periodic table and biochemistry.

Concrete reasons to be skeptical about an ‘Abstract Wikipedia’

After much postponement, writing the final report for my NWO Veni grant (2015-2018) turned out to be an unexpected pleasure. It made me realise a couple of things — key among them the role of serendipity in shaping fundamental research. The project was called “Towards a science of linguistic depiction”. Looking at the publications that came out of it and at imperfect indicators like citations, it’s made some useful contributions.

The role of serendipity in shaping fundamental research

Magritte’s best known work by far is of course his drawing of a pipe with the text

 Ceci n’est pas une pipe

. He made several versions over the years, but the work originated in 1928 or 1929. The title Magritte gave to this painting is

 La trahison des images

— the treachery of images.

Magritte on Words and Images (PDF)

Ideophones, like so many things in life, are easy to identify but hard to define. Many researchers have grumbled about the shortcomings of Doke’s descriptive characterization of ideophones (see discussion here), but few have attempted to formulate an alternative. For better or worse, I did,

 1

but it took me a few iterations to arrive at something that I felt worked well enough to be useful in cross-linguistic research.

What’s wrong with “vivid”? The evolution of a definition

Few historical maps of Ghana’s Volta and Oti regions have been invested with so much political and sociohistorical meaning as Hans Gruner’s 1913 map of the Togo Plateau. Gruner, stationed for over twenty years at Misahöhe in present-day Togo, was a long-time colonial administrator known for his ethnographical and historical knowledge of the area.

The Gruner Map: a 1913 map of the Togo Plateau in present-day Ghana

DALL-E, a new image generation system by OpenAI, does impressive visualizations of biased datasets. I like how the first example that OpenAI used to present DALL-E to the world is a meme-like koala dunking a baseball leading into an array of old white men — representing at one blow the past and future of representation and generation.

Deep learning, image generation, and the rise of bias automation machines

I have been blogging at

 The Ideophone

since 2007, and not all of it has been as ephemeral as my PhD promotor once feared. My short post documenting the etymology of Zotero is apparently the only scientific documentation of where Zotero’s name comes from; it has served as a source in Wikipedia for ages and has received over 15 scholarly citations.

Scholarly blogging, now with DOIs

Academia.edu takes your academic work and puts it behind a privacy-defying signup form, laces it with ads, botches the metadata, and tries to appease you by offering stats and social ranking that promote constant comparison. What’s not to like?

A while back some low quality citations started showing up on Google Scholar. They had titles like “CHAPTER 2 draft — email xyz@ab.edu” and it was hard find actual bibliographic metadata. Google Scholar seemed to have scraped random PDFs uploaded on Academia.edu and decided it was worth counting the citations in them even in the absence of proper metadata.

How Academia.edu promotes poor metadata and plays to our vanity

Interjections are, in Felix Ameka’s memorable formulation, “the universal yet neglected part of speech” (1992). They are rarely the subject of historical, typological or comparative research in linguistics, and as Aimée Lahaussois has shown (2016), they are notably underrepresented in descriptive grammars. As grammars are the main source of data for typologists, this is of course a perfect example of a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

How should descriptive grammars cover interjections?

Lezenswaardig: een groep jonge medici ageert tegen de marketing-wedstrijd waarin volgens hen narratieve CVs in kunnen ontaarden — de nieuwste bijdrage aan het Erkennen &amp; Waarderen-debat. Maar niets is wat het lijkt. Over evidence-based CVs, kwaliteit &amp; kwantificatie.

Eerst dit: de brief benoemt het risico dat je met narratieve CVs een soort competitie krijgt tussen verhalen.

Van betekenisloze getallen naar een evidence-based CV

Large language models make it entirely trivial to generate endless amounts of seemingly plausible text. There’s no need to be cynical to see the virtual inevitability of unending waves of algorithmically tuned AI-generated uninformation: the market forces are in place and they will be relentless.

Large language models and the unstoppable tide of uninformation

With Times Higher Education writing about citation gaming and hyperprolific authors (surely not unrelated) I hope we can save some of our attention for what Uta Frith and others have called slow science.

Team science is slow science

PLOS ONE notoriously and astonishingly does not have a proofs stage: authors do not get to see how their work is typeset until the very day it appears. Worse, they have a policy of only correcting formatting errors that they themselves introduce by issuing a formal correction notice — a heavyhanded method that most other journals use only for serious errors of fact or process. Unnecessary corrections hurt authors.

Note: I prepared this posting in August 2015, when PLOS ONE was due to publish a paper by us and I wanted to make sure they’d avoid the stupid typesetting errors they made in our 2013 paper. I used the numbers to convince them to show us proofs beforehand.

Why PLOS ONE needs page proofs

Travel journals provide some of the first written sources on Akpafu. I have previously posted an excerpt from a 1887 journal by David Asante. This here is an excerpt from a similar journey two years later. The whole journey took three months, but this excerpt relates only a trip to two Akpafu towns on 17-18 December 1889.

A visit to Akpafu by Nicolas Clerk, 1889

Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle is one of the founding fathers of African linguistics, and 1854 was one of his more productive years: he published the first large-scale comparison of some 200 African languages (the famed Polyglotta Africana), but also a corpus of Kanuri folklore, a grammar of Vai, and a grammar of Kanuri.

It is high time for a continuation of our series honouring the ancestors of ideophone studies. Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle is one of the founding fathers of African linguistics, and 1854 was one of his more productive years.

Early sources on African ideophones, part IV: S.W. Koelle on Kanuri, 1854

Zotero takes it name from an Albanian verb minus some morphology.

If you’ve read yesterday’s post (Zotero, an Endnote alternative) or come across Zotero elsewhere, you may have been wondering about its name.

The etymology of Zotero

The most common use of the term ‘ideophone’ today is as a term for a lexical or grammatical category of words. This use goes back to C.M. Doke, who introduced the term in this sense for the description of Bantu languages. However, Doke did not coin the term. Who did, and how was it used before Doke?

(

 Note:

Looking for a modern definition of the term? Check out “

 ‘Ideophone’ as a comparative concept

” (2019). That chapter supplies the following:

 Ideophone

*. Member of an open lexical class of marked words that depict sensory imagery.* It provides evidence and arguments for the cross-linguistic utility of this definition.) A common term for expressive vocabulary in African linguistics is ‘ideophone’.

On the history of the term ‘ideophone’

Some years ago I was following a course by Maarten Kossmann on Tuareg (Tamasheq, Tamajeq, Tamahaq). It was thoroughly enjoyable. After the first lecture we were all alotted a letter of the great

 Dictionnaire Touareg — Français


 1

(a consonant, obviously), and for the remainder of the course these 15 to 40 dictionary pages would form the basis for a number of excercises in the weeks to follow. It was an interesting method;

Expressive verbs in Tuareg

I note with sadness that William J. Samarin has passed away in Toronto on January 16, 2020 at the age of 93. An all too short obituary notes that he was “known for his work on the language of religion and on two Central African languages: Sango and Gbeya”.  In linguistics, Samarin was of course also known for his extensive work on ideophones, playful and evocative words with sensory meanings.

Farewell, Mr. Ideophone: William J. Samarin (1926-2020)

There is a minor industry in speech science and NLP devoted to detecting and removing disfluencies. In some of our recent work we’re showing that treating talk as sanitised text can adversely impact voice user interfaces. However, this is still a minority position. Googlers Dan Walker and Dan Liebling represent the mainstream view well in this blog post:  Fair enough, you might say.

Sawing off the branch you’re sitting on

One of the benefits of today’s preprint culture is that it is possible to provide constructive critique of pending work before it is out, thereby enabling a rapid cycle of revision before things are committed to print. I have myself benefited from comments on preprints, and have acknowledged such public pre-publication reviews in several of my papers. The below remarks are shared in that spirit.

Pitfalls of fossil-thinking I

A preprint claims that “ideas from theoretical linguistics have played no role in [NLP]”. Outside the confines of Chomskyan linguistics folks have long been working on  incorporating storage, retrieval, gating and attention in theories of language, with direct relevance to computational models. The only way to give any content to the claim is by giving the notion “theoretical linguistics” the narrowest conceivable reading.

This Lingbuzz preprint by Baroni is a nice read if you’re interested in linguistically oriented deep net analysis. I did feel it’s a bit hampered by the near-exclusive equation of linguistic theory with generative/Chomskyan aps.

Linguistic roots of connectionism

Over two years ago I wrote about the unstoppable tide of uninformation that follows the rise of large language models. With ChatGPT and other models bringing large-scale text generation to the masses, I want to register a dystopian prediction.

Monetizing uninformation: a prediction

I have always had a fondness for things considered marginal in linguistics. The tide may be turning for at least some marginalia: work on ideophones is clearly on the rise, and initiatives such as Martina Wiltschko’s Eh lab at UBC and a new nonlexical vocalizations project at Linköping University show there is significant interest in this area.

Composite ideophone-gesture utterances in the Ashéninka Perené ‘community of practice’, an Amazonian Arawak society from Central-Eastern Peru

New!

Some of this is now published here (open access, free for all!): Dingemanse, Mark. 2020.

What is ‘non-lexical’? Notes on non-lexical vocalisations, II

The oldest written fragments of Siwu found so far come from Rudolph Plehn (1898).

 1

Besides some words and phrases (edited and published in 1899 by his friend Seidel), Plehn took down two lines of songs. To one of them I devoted a post some time ago.

Bingo! Refinding the oldest specimen of Siwu

I have always had a fondness for things considered marginal in linguistics. The tide may be turning for at least some marginalia: work on ideophones is clearly on the rise, and initiatives such as Martina Wiltschko’s Eh lab at UBC and a new nonlexical vocalizations project at Linköping University show there is significant interest in this area. Part I from my notes on a workshop on ‘Ideophones and non-lexical vocalizations’.

Making new ideophones in Siwu

On the margins of language: Ideophones, interjections and dependencies in linguistic theory

Bodily Quoting in Dance Correction

Turn organization and bodily-vocal demonstrations

Last week I was happy to present my work at a workshop on

 Ideophones and nonlexical vocalisations

in Linköping, Sweden, organised by Leelo Keevallik and Emily Hofstetter. This was the kick-off for a new project on “Non-lexical vocalisations”. It was my first time in Linköping and it was great getting to know the vibrant community of interaction researchers from across departments.

A variety of vocal depictions: Notes on non-lexical vocalisations, I

One of the key tasks scientists need to master is how to manage bibliographic information: collecting relevant literature, building a digital library, and handling citations and bibliographies during writing. This tutorial introduces Zotero (www.zotero.org), an easy to use reference management tool made by scholars for scholars. The tutorial covers the basics of using Zotero for collecting, organizing, citing and sharing research.

Slides for a hands-on Zotero workshop

We don’t generally see PhD dissertations as an exciting genre to read, and that is wholly our loss. As the publishing landscape of academia is fast being homogenised, the thesis is one of the last places where we have a chance to see the unalloyed brilliance of up and coming researchers. Let me show you using three examples of remarkable theses I have come across in the past years.

Mindblowing dissertations

Writing is thinking. The writing process is the most neglected part of our job. We spend millions on fancy equipment and uncountable hours on training for using this or that toolkit. Yet we assume the BA-level academic writing course we once followed is sufficient; the rest we’ll just learn on the job and hopefully soon we’ll automate away with LLMs. It is all formulaic anyway.

Like anyone active in the space of LLMs and generative AI, I get a growing amount of invitations to speak at conferences and colloquia on something or other LLM-related. A subset of these invites is about the relation between LLMs and academic writing. Recently I had the occasion to respond to such an invite.

Find your own voice: against LLM slop in academic writing

It’s easy to forget amidst a rising tide of synthetic text, but language is not actually about strings of words, and language scientists would do well not to chain themselves to models that presume so. For apt and timely commentary we turn to Bronislaw Malinowski who wrote:  In follow-up work, Malinowski has critiqued the unexamined use of decontextualised strings of words as a proxy for Meaning:  Malinowski did not write this on his substack,

Malinowski (1922) on Large Language Models

Featured philologist of today is Joh. Bernhard Schlegel, for providing us with precious data on ideophones (expressives) in nineteenth-century Ewe, a Kwa language of southeastern Ghana.

This is the first post in a series. Featured philologist of today is Joh. Bernhard Schlegel, for providing us with precious data on ideophones (expressives) in nineteenth-century Ewe, a Kwa language of southeastern Ghana. But since this is the first post on ideophones here, let’s first try to answer the obvious question: what are ideophones, anyway?

Early sources on African ideophones, part I: Schlegel on Ewe, 1857

Having been a small and quite isolated language for centuries, Siwu was relatively late to attract attention from outsiders. Europeans in search for gold to buy and people to enslave for the most part stayed near the coast.

‘Remnants of some ancient tribal idiom’: deciphering the oldest Siwu to appear in print

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.

Aduerbia sonus: Ideophones in two 17th century grammars of Japanese

This is the first ever published account of a visit to Akpafu. It was written down by David Asante, a Twi pastor who travelled throughout today’s Volta Region in the company of some white missionaries. The journey took place in January 1887; the date of the visit to Akpafu was January 25th, 1887.

A visit to Akpafu by David Asante, 1887

Words evolve not as blobs of ink on paper but in face to face interaction. The nature of language as fundamentally interactive and multimodal is shown by the study of ideophones, vivid sensory words that thrive in conversations around the world. The ways in which these “Lautbilder” enable precise communication about sensory knowledge has now for the first time been studied in detail.

Words   Few professions should be more familiar with the nature of words than academia. Words are the currency of our trade. They record our cumulative progress and they measure our productivity as we disperse our ideas through articles and books. How easy is it to fall in love with the printed word, black symbols on a white page, tidy spaces separating units of thought like stars dotting the skies of conceptual clarity!

How to paint with language

Will synthetic text generators usher in a new age of creative thinking? The remarkable fluency of large language models may make them interesting tools for rapidly exploring semantic and stylistic spaces, yet the deceptive ease with which they generate output also provides countless new ways of appropriating ideas and erasing authorship.

Human creativity in the age of text generators

Funeral dirges (

 sìnɔ

in Siwu) are sung during the period of public mourning preceding a burial. The musical structures of these dirges, the performances, and their place in the larger context of the funeral have been described in some detail by Agawu (1988) and before him by the German missionary Friedrich Kruse (1911); however, the linguistic aspects of the genre have not received any attention so far.

I thought I had company (a Mawu dirge)

The Ideophone

::: {.wp-block-image}
<figure class="alignright is-resized">
<img
src="https://ideophone.org/files/Samarin_Utoronto_1065506-675x1024.png"
class="wp-image-5277" loading="lazy" decoding="async"
srcset="https://ideophone.org/files/Samarin_Utoronto_1065506-675x1024.png 675w, https://ideophone.org/files/Samarin_Utoronto_1065506-198x300.png 198w, https://ideophone.org/files/Samarin_Utoronto_1065506-768x1165.png 768w, https://ideophone.org/files/Samarin_Utoronto_1065506.png 1012w"
sizes="(max-width: 174px) 100vw, 174px" width="174" height="264" />
<figcaption>William John Samarin (photo University of
Toronto)</figcaption>
</figure>
:::

I note with sadness that William J. Samarin has passed away in Toronto
on January 16, 2020 at the age of 93. An all too short
[obituary](https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/theglobeandmail/obituary.aspx?n=william-j-samarin&pid=195156400){rel="noreferrer noopener"
aria-label="obituary (opens in a new tab)" target="_blank"} notes that
he was "known for his work on the language of religion and on two
Central African languages: Sango and Gbeya".

In linguistics, Samarin was of course also known for his extensive work
on ideophones, playful and evocative words with sensory meanings. Only a
few years after his Berkeley PhD he published a short and visionary
paper on "African ideophones" (1966) that foreshadowed many of the
themes that would occupy him in the next decades. A string of empirical
and theoretical papers followed that brought new *élan* to the study of
ideophones by dramatically extending the methodological toolbox and the
kinds of topics studied, from lexical semantics to sociolinguistic
variation, and from semantic typology to the use of ideophones in
insults.

I have worked on the topic of ideophones a little over a decade now, and
Samarin was always there in the background. He was there in the form of
his formidable oeuvre, but also through active correspondence we kept up
until halfway 2018. In this blog I want to share some personal
recollections as well as some unpublished notes by Samarin about how he
came to the study of ideophones.

Incidentally, we didn't start off very well. In early 2010, when I first
wrote to him as a wide-eyed grad student sharing a half-baked draft of a
paper, he wrote back with stern (and justified) advice:

> You see that if were your supervisor, I would be giving you a hard
> time about your generalizations. ... Make sure that you are being as
> hard on yourself as you are (or might be) on others. (Samarin,
> personal communication, March 2010)

Several of my early interactions with Samarin were like this, and his
bluntness was fairly intimidating to a PhD student in love with
ideophones. Our exchanges led me to seriously rethink my rhetorical
approach, placing more emphasis on theoretical foundations and
methodological choices, and being as gentle and constructive as possible
--- in line with his advice to be "as hard on yourself as you are (or
might be) on others". This is why the acknowledgements of my PhD thesis
note that "Samarin in particular has been highly sceptical at one point,
and helpfully so".

In late 2011, I sent him a hard copy of [my
thesis](http://thesis.ideophone.org/){rel="noreferrer noopener"
aria-label="my thesis (opens in a new tab)" target="_blank"}, a 400 page
tome that he received in good spirits. This marked a change in our
interactions, as he started to treat me more like a peer than a clueless
grad student. In a message acknowledging receipt of the thesis, he
fondly recalled how he used to be called "Mr Ideophone" at Leiden
University, where he spent part of his sabbatical in 1966-1967:

> Considering myself to be one of the pioneers in the study of
> ideophones (Jan Voorhoeve used to call me *Mr Ideophone*!), I am so
> pleased that they *finally* are getting the attention they deserve.
> They are the *dramatic* aspect of everyday speech, and speech should
> not be reduced to formulas and diagrams. (Samarin, personal
> communication, October 2011)

In later years, I would send drafts and papers to him knowing that they
would get a tough but fair reading; and I would get the occasional email
from him asking to look up an academic article not available in his
library. His criticism remained as blunt and direct as ever, which made
his rare notes of appreciation all the more precious.
^[1](#footnote_0_5275 "About my Glossa review, he wrote: “It was thoughtful of you to inform me of the publication in ‘Glossa’ of your “chronological narrative” about ideophones. But you are being too modest: the essay is much more than that; it’s a ‘white paper’ or template for the study of this phenomenon that you so clearly describe from different points of view. It’s as if you were holding a handful of ore in you palm that contained a lot of gold. (…) Carry on with your good work. Bill.”"){#identifier_0_5275
.footnote-link .footnote-identifier-link}^

## Samarin on ideophones {#samarin-on-ideophones .wp-block-heading}

In one of our exchanges I asked Bill how he got involved in the study of
ideophones. He responded, "since you asked me how I got on to studying 
ideophones I decided to write a bit of autobiography for my archives." I
don't know whether this bit of autobiography actually appears in his
archives, so I share it here for posterity:

> My serious study of ideophones arose from the fact that grammarians
> were not taking them seriously in African languages. They were even
> trivialized. This puzzled me because I found that they were used
> frequently in everyday discourse in all kinds of circumstances in the
> Gbaya (Gbeya) language which I began to analyze and learn in February
> 1954. Some of them I heard rather often, others rarely, but I could
> not ignore them if I wanted to speak the language in the same way
> Gbayas in northwestern Ubangi-Shari spoke it. I was using the language
> all day long, almost to the exclusion of Sango, in the Bossangoa
> district, most of whose population spoke mutually intelligible
> varieties of Gbaya. ... Besides, they were curious words (like *kpiti
> kpiti*, with high tones) and hard to define.
>
> But it was after I had written my grammar of the language in 1961 that
> I undertook to study them as a worthy topic in African linguistics.
> Naturally, the first thing was to read what had been said about them.
> This meant perusing grammars. Fortunately, I was a visiting professor
> at the University of Leiden in 1966-1967. There were plenty of
> grammars there, also at School of African Studies in London and at the
> Hartford Seminary Foundation, where I was teaching. (Henry Alan
> Gleason Jr had been librarian there, making an effort to acquire
> literature for graduate study in linguistics.) 
> 
> Following our departure from the Central African Republic in 1960 I
> made several trips back for further work on Sango. These gave me the
> opportunity to sneak in some systematic study of Gbaya ideophones,
> like the one where I tape-recorded descriptions of someone making a
> clay pot in Sango and in Gbaya. I had more opportunity for study in
> Leiden, where my assistant was a Gbaya young married man. And in
> December 1972 my wife and I spent two weeks in the village of Bowai
> once again working on ideophones. 
> 
> By this time my focus was on trying to demonstrate that Gbaya
> ideophones were authentic words that could (and should) be entered in
> a dictionary, not ephemeral and spontaneous idiolectal creations. And
> by this time one was able to analyze data with a computer, at that
> time with punched cards. For a while, therefore, I was working on the
> origin and development of Sango with my right hand and ideophones with
> my left one. A fire destroyed my computer data at the university, but
> there are many tape recordings in my archives at the University of
> Toronto. (Samarin, personal communication, January 2016)

The papers Samarin published in this period include important
methodological contributions (Samarin 1967, 1970a, 1971a), a
wide-ranging piece on expressive language (Samarin 1970b), and a
comprehensive literature review of work on ideophones in Bantu (Samarin
1971b). I have built on Samarin's work in several of my papers, but I
don't think a comprehensive appraisal of his methodological and
theoretical to the study of ideophones is available. That is beyond the
scope of this blog, however.

## Rewards beyond words {#rewards-beyond-words .wp-block-heading}

Samarin and I were last in touch in 2018, when I wrote to him with a
note of appreciation about his 1998 autobiographical essay (Samarin
1998). That essay contains the following gem which seemed to me entirely
typical of Samarin's poetic sensibilities and attention to detail:

> If you have seen the full moon rising out of the deep sands that
> surround 
> Timbuctoo dwarfing the sky as well as earth in its clarity and
> brilliance while you are drinking mint tea with some Tamachek-speaking
> 'Blue People,' you will have experienced some rewards beyond words and
> sharing. If you are sensitive to such beauty, of course. It is given
> to us who study language to have rewarding experiences, sometimes of
> simple pleasure, sometimes of 'spiritual' if not of almost
> transcendental significance.
>
> *I have just teased a young girl going the opposite way by remarking
> that whereas she had a parasol to protect herself from the sun, what
> could I do without one. About fifteen feet away from me she stops and
> says,* 'Kà ga mu ma'*, and I am overwhelmed with information and
> sensations: I hear the first word in a construction where I wouldn't
> have expected it; I notice that she does not use the determinant* 'ni'
> *with the meaning 'it;' I enjoy the precise stepping up of pitch from
> low to mid to high and the abrupt falling to low again as she tells
> me, with no twinkle of coquetry on her lips, but with the spontaneous
> generosity of a well-reared African child: 'So come take it.' This is
> an imperishable and complex vignette. It illustrates the reward of
> being able to talk Sango and use it appropriately with another human
> being.* (Samarin 1998:27)

I wrote to Bill to say I was touched by this vignette --- it is such an
eloquent representation of that quintessential fieldworkers' feeling of
belonging. It captures something very deep and real about the privilege
of taking part in other linguistic and social worlds. It also brings out
the always-on analytical mindset of the fieldworker, for whom being in
the moment is always puncuated by meta-observations. Field work, for me,
is very much about that liminal state between 'other' and 'insider',
never fully one or the other, yet enough of both to feel oddly
detached-yet-grounded.

In writing back, Bill shared another biographical fact that few people
may know: his involvement as a linguistics expert in an International
Criminal Court case about atrocities in Bangui (his expert testimony
concerned the possibility of recognizing the Congolese origin of the
perpetrators on the basis of their accents). He ended his message,
characteristically, with a note of appreciation about field work that
will resonate strongly with many linguists and anthropologists.

> It was kind of you to comment on my professional memoir. I especially
> was pleased by your having perceived the emotion I had in recalling
> that experience with the little girl, which is repeated every time I
> recall it. She responded to my lighthearted remark with maturity,
> self-confidence, kindness, and trust, a lot more than many adults
> would have done. I should have interrupted my walk back home to go
> with her in the opposite direction to continue with a conversation.
>
> You put your finger on the feeling of "belonging." That's what brought
> tears when I was testifying before the International Criminal Court in
> The Hague in 2011. (A Congolese general was being tried for what his
> soldiers did in Bangui.) The love I have for Central Africans welled
> up in me. ... Field work gives us the opportunity to be enriched and
> blessed in many ways. (Samarin, personal communication, April 2018)

Besides working on ideophones, Samarin made important contributions to
the fields of contact linguistics, field linguistics, and the study of
glossolalia. I hope someone more qualified than me will write a
comprehensive academic obituary. Here, I have just highlighted some of
his pioneering contributions to the study of ideophones, which his work
helped make not merely respectable but also exciting and relevant to the
broader language sciences.

Samarin prided himself in being nicknamed *Mr. Ideophone* by Jan
Voorhoeve in the 1960s. His lasting intellectual legacy may be that he
helped prepare the field for contributions by a much wider range of
scholars, so that today there is no longer a single "Mr" or "Ms" or "Mx"
Ideophone, but a broad network of diverse researchers working together.
Farewell, Mr. Ideophone!

## References cited {#references-cited .wp-block-heading}

A good amount of Samarin's work is available in the [University of
Toronto's T-SPACE
repository](https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807/67119){rel="noreferrer noopener"
target="_blank"}. In 2018, Samarin sent me a overview of his papers,
presentations, and research projects which I will publish in a separate
post as it provides a good overview of his work from his own point of
view. Here are the papers cited above:

- Samarin, W. J. (1965). Perspective on African ideophones. *African
 Studies*, 24(2), 117--121.
- Samarin, W. J. (1967). Determining the meaning of ideophones. Journal
 of West African Languages, 4(2), 35--41.
- Samarin, W. J. (1970a). Field procedures in ideophone research.
 Journal of African Languages, 9(1), 27--30.
- Samarin, W. J. (1970b). Inventory and choice in expressive language.
 Word, 26, 153--169.
- Samarin, W. J. (1971a). Measuring variation in the use of Gbeya
 ideophones. Annales de L'Université d'Abidjan, Ser. H, 2, 483--488.
- Samarin, W. J. (1971b). Survey of Bantu ideophones. African Language
 Studies, 12, 130--168.
- Samarin, W. J. (1998). C'est passionnant d'être passionné. In E. F. K.
 Koerner (Ed.), *First person singular III: Autobiographies by North
 American scholars in the language sciences* (pp. 187--226).
 Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

::: {.footnotes-made-easy-header}
## Footnotes
:::

1. [About my [Glossa
 review](https://www.glossa-journal.org/articles/10.5334/gjgl.444/){rel="noreferrer noopener"
 aria-label="Glossa review (opens in a new tab)" target="_blank"}, he
 wrote: "It was thoughtful of you to inform me of the publication in
 'Glossa' of your "chronological narrative" about ideophones. But you
 are being too modest: the essay is much more than that; it's a
 'white paper' or template for the study of this phenomenon that you
 so clearly describe from different points of view. It's as if you
 were holding a handful of ore in you palm that contained a lot of
 gold. (...) Carry on with your good work.
 Bill."[[\[]{.fme-pre-backlink}[↩](https://ideophone.org/farewell-mr-ideophone-william-j-samarin-1926-2020/#identifier_0_5275 "Jump back to text"){.footnote-link
 .footnote-back-link
 aria-label="Jump back to text"}[\]]{.fme-pre-backlink}]{.footnote-back-link-wrapper}]{#footnote_0_5275}