Published in The Ideophone
Author Mark Dingemanse
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 &