The lexicographic treatment of Ideophones in Zulu

Abstract

The ideophone, a word class not unique to but highly characteristic of the Bantu languages, presents particular challenges in both monolingual and bilingual lexicography. Not only is this part of speech without a counterpart in most other languages, the meaning of ideo-phones is highly elusive. In this research article these challenges are studied by means of an analy-sis of the treatment of ideophones in a corpus-driven Zulu–English school dictionary project.

Keywords: lexicography, dictionary, bilingual, corpus, frequency, bantu, zulu (isizulu), english, ideophone, semantic import, paraphrase, part-of-speech mismatch