Ideophones and Sound Symbolism in Atlantic Creoles (review)

This volume is an exploration of the nature, function, and evolution of ideophones and sound symbolism with particular reference to the Atlantic creoles. It is best read as a provisional attempt to define what an ideophone is, and to derive tentative etymologies of ideophones in the Atlantic creoles. The subject is slippery for a variety of reasons, including the nature of expressive language, and a lack of adequate sources in key areas.

About five pages are devoted to a preface, an introduction, concluding remarks, and a very brief survey of the literature in Ch. 1. It is Chs. 2 and 3 that embody the essential content of this book. Ch. 2 seeks a crosslinguistic characterization of ideophones. Since the possible features of an ideophone are not all found in a single language, Bartens suggests a prototype definition as most appropriate. Some properties of the prototype are more central than others: reduplication/reiteration, for example, is especially characteristic of ideophones. Phonological properties typically include various irregularities in terms of inventory, frequency, phonotactics, or paralinguistic expressiveness. But the syntactic properties prove more resistant to definition even in terms of whether ideophones are separate word classes, and attempts to establish ideophone subcategories quickly break down as fuzzy boundaries merge. Semantic properties are also elusive, although certain fields, such as color, movement, and sounds, are recurrent, and pragmatically, ideophones can become associated with a variety of social situations involving identity or style. On the whole, B succeeds in making us aware of the variousness of ideophones, but a definition that allows identification of ideophones with scientific rigor remains out of reach.

Ch. 3 discusses how ideophones are used in Atlantic creoles and provides some tentative etymologies. One intention of this material is to shed some light on the origin of creoles, but this is not carried very far, and, in any case, is hampered by the general lack of adequate sources for the substrate languages of, for example, the Portuguese-based Upper Guinea creoles. The largest section of the chapter is devoted to ideophones considered to be from the African substrate languages, and B presents numerous examples where such sources are likely. Less attention is given to expressions from the superstrate and from the convergence of both levels. Selection of ideophones for etymologizing seems to have depended to some extent on the plausibility of available information and facts uncovered during fieldwork rather than on a systematic plan.

This book does not attempt definitive coverage of its subject. It takes first steps, some of them tentative, into a complex area of linguistic interaction where many facts are still not known and judgments are often quite subjective. Perhaps readers will be interested enough by what they find here to continue the exploration.