A Look at Some Ideophones in Mongolian Riddles

Abstract The Mongolian riddle corpus is very rich in visual and spatial metaphors which are used to convey traditional notions of the herders’ nomadic life, metaphorical and structural images of the cosmos, and the place of humans within this cosmos. Included in the imagery of this rich visual vocabulary are ideophones, a special category of ‘depicting words’, which are abundantly represented in the riddle corpus. Drawing upon the riddle collections contained in Enigmas and Puzzles of Mongolia by Lovor & Ölziixutag (1990), Ten Thousand Riddles by Ölziixutag (2013), and Oral Texts of Ordos by Mostaert (2010), in this paper I examine a number of ideophones in the riddle corpus, including zadgai, angas, zangas ‘open, exposed’, meltes ‘peer out’, gyals ‘shine, flash’, daldgai ‘broad’, maiga ‘bowlegged, bandy-legged, clubfoot’, and maiǰig ‘crooked’. These ideophones lend vividness to the micro-narratives the riddles create, often adding more than a touch of expressiveness and, at times, humour. Certain ideophones adhere to certain images, such as angas / zangas in the image of the elephant’s mouth opening as a metaphor for the breaking of dawn. In other cases, a single ideophone can depict many different kinds of phenomena, attesting to the adaptability of this category of words. An examination of close riddle variants may also provide a clue as to these generation of these riddles.