Talk:Verbum dicendi

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"S/He raised an alarm and went "bóbóbó" ??? Are you kidding? --210.11.188.20 05:11, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

You might want to take note that that's an attempt at a translation of a sentence from Ewe. In Ewe, it makes perfect sense to say "É-ƒú así nu bé bóbóbó", the point being that 'bóbóbó' is an ideophone introduced by the verbum dicendi 'bé'. — mark ✎ 07:32, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

"The particle to in Japanese both marks a quotation, and indicates an ideophonic expression as in Ewe." Ewe happens to have the same quotative particle, "to", as in Japanese? Wow, what a coincidence!

Actually, I think that, although it was badly phrased, that was actually a good point.

The quotative verb may be used with ideophones in many African languages. You might like to Google for and read "The history of quotative predicatives: Can lexical properties arise out of a grammatical construction?" by Tom Güldemann.

In the Bantu languages the verb often used is Proto-Bantu *-ti (it is interesting to note that, like English "be", the three main "defective" irregular verbs in the Bantu languages -- *-di, *-na, and *-ti -- may be used in copulae, suggesting to me that *-ti probably meant "to be" and that the more common meaning "to say" was a later development; this is also good evidence, as if it was really needed, that originally pre-Bantu verbs did not all end with *-a, as they do today). Here is an example in Sesotho (see also Sesotho parts of speech#Ideophones):

A re "Ke a tsamaya" And he said "I am leaving"

A re pote! And he disappeared behind a corner (lit And he said "pote!")

Tebello TheWHAT!!?? 12:13, 13 October 2007 (UTC)