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)

Planed Edits to Verbum dicendi entry

As part of a linguistics project, we are planning to edit this entry, and add examples of verbum dicendi from English and Japanese, as well as adding phrase structure trees that illustrate their syntax.RM Dechaine (talk) 20:14, 8 November 2017 (UTC)