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.

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.

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.

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.

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 &

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

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.

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?

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;

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.