[Lingtyp] Typology of segments in ideophones from a typological perspective

[Jess Tauber]

Hi folks. I just finished a few weeks ago translations from French to
English of ideophones from two dialects of Gbaya, a Ubangian language from
the Central African Replublic.

Over the past few days I analyzed grave-featured final segments in these
forms> I've found that for the most part, they deal with issues of
figure-ground merger (labial stops or nasals) versus separation (velars),
with associated loss or gain of energy and/or order (entropy/antientropy).
Other languages may operate in this fashion as well, but I would not have
thought about the contrasts in these terms til now. And there also seems to
be morphosyntactic effects. Verb-final languages seem to share with
Japanese the split of theme properties for first syllable, and
spatiotemporal context for the second, for bisyllabic ideophones (as first
discovered by Prof. Shoko Hamano). In Gbaya, on the other hand, it seems
that the spatiotemporal context comes first, and the theme properties
finally for bisyllables, but this requires further analysis and comparison.
I'd noticed some years ago that the Mayan language Tzotzil had 'affect
verbs' (what they've got for ideophones) where the phonosemantics of the
first segment in affect root tended to match that of FINAL segments in
ideophone roots in verb-final languages (Tzotzil is verb-initial).

Any thoughts from the peanut gallery? Thanks.

Jess Tauber
tetrahedralpt at gmail.com
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