my soul failed me when he spoke

The interconfessional Chichewa translation (publ. 1999) uses the ideophone fumu in Song of Songs 5:6 to describe a sudden drop and a lovesick weakening (“As he spoke, my heart collapsed within me”). (Source: Ernst Wendland)

Ideophones are a class of sound symbolic words expressing human sensation that are used as literary devices in many African languages. (Source: Philip Noss)

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