ABSTRACT
Down in the present village, underneath the hill, old women offer stories. Their storytelling is rich, not only in motifs and tropes but also in terms of linguistic creativity. Most of their stories, at a particular time and in a particular context, are about ghosts, and these ghosts, as well as the liminal spaces they are located in, are introduced by a specialized sound-symbolic category of words. This chapter offers a new and original concept of ideophones, which, to speakers of Hone, formed one of the most central and most powerful parts of language as such. The point of entry into Hone was not the proper knowledge of its phonology, nouns and verbs, but the sound-symbolism that depicted the exact space where people and ghosts, the living and dead, the visible and invisible met – the liminal space.
