“So it's got three meanings dil dil:” Seductive ideophony and the sounds of Navajo poetry

Abstract

This article engages questions about translation, phonological iconicity, and seductive ideophony. I begin by discussing the work of Paul Friedrich as it relates to questions of linguistic relativity and poetics and the qualities of music and myth that constitute poetry. I then present a poem written in Navajo by Rex Lee Jim and four translations of the poem. Three are from Navajo consultants and one of those translations will be, from a certain perspective, rather surprising. Namely, why does one consultant translate this poem as if it is composed of ideophones? The fourth translation is mine. I then work through the morphology of the poem in Navajo, saying something more about the translators and the process of translation. I then provide a transcript of a conversation I had with Blackhorse Mitchell about this poem. I use this to take up questions of phonological iconicity (punning) and the seductive quality of ideophony (the pole of music). I also place this poem within a context of the stick game in Navajo philosophy (the pole of myth). This leads, in the conclusion, to reflections about linguistic relativity, misunderstandings, sound, and poetics.

Chapter 1. ‘Ideophone’ as a comparative concept

“…The reason this rarely works is threefold: (i) the number of possible iconic interpretations of any string of speech sounds is vast, (ii) the space of possible lexical meanings is orders of magnitude larger if not infinite, and (iii) both the form and meaning spaces are warped by language-specific properties (Bühler 1934;Werner and Kaplan 1963;Dingemanse 2018). Especially in languages with inventories of conventionalised ideophones that run into the thousands, there is no way that these words could simply present unmediated iconic associations (Güldemann 2008).…”

“A Line Will Take Us Hours Maybe:”Craft and Inspiration from the Ethnography of Poetry

“…Discerning which is which is not so easily done from any vantage point. here is, then, not just an ambiguity within Jim's poems (see Webster, 2015Webster, , 2016Webster, , 2017, but there is also an ambiguity that surrounds the authorship of the poems. Here it is useful to mention that Jim (1995) oten publishes his poetry using his Navajo name Mazii Dinéłtsoi and not his English-language name Rex Lee Jim.…”

Expressives and the multimodal depiction of social types in Mundari

“…In this setting, where the expressives were tightly linked with the landscape and social environment, one could see how speakers multimodally craft and orient the topical universes of expressive depiction, bringing in aspects of the social and material environment. These depictions, with their dense elaboration of iconic and indexical signification, have the capacity, as Webster notes in a similar elicitation study of Navajo expressives, to ‘seduce’ interlocutors into a world of meaning (Webster 2017).…”

“…For instance, Hymes (1979) investigated Sapir's study of talking 'like a bear' in Takelma, another language of the Pacific northwest, suggesting that the expressive prefix 'l' or 's' that Sapir associated with 'Bear' in Takelma narratives actually extends to a range of social types, such as 'old person', 'mother', or 'foreigner'. Silverstein (2006) and Webster (2017) demonstrate how expressive meaning is negotiated and modeled on mythological characters in Native American languages Wasco-Wishram and Navajo, respectively. These models, which are so pervasive for speakers that they can only be understood through an intertextual analysis, create, as Silverstein suggested, a 'pragmatic metaphorical set' that shapes the belief that forms have an inherent 'denotational iconicity' in speaker understanding (Silverstein 2006:41).…”

“…Feld 1982cf. Feld /2012Nuckolls 1996;Voeltz & Killian Hatz 2001;Kohn 2013;Hiraga, Herlofsky, Shimohara, & Akita 2015;Webster 2015;Haiman 2018). Challenging the conventional notion of expressives as sound-symbolic words (or onomatopoeia), Dingemanse, in a review of recent research, defines expressives as 'marked words that DEPICT sensual imagery ' (2012:655).…”