In Gbaya, the notion of the white color of “teeth (that) are like a flock of ewes” is expressed with the addition that those sheep have just been bathed and emphasized with ndáká-ndáká, an ideophone used to describe something very white. Similarly, in the interconfessional Chichewa translation (publ. 1999) the ideophone mbee is used which has the same effect. (Source: Philip Noss and Ernst Wendland)

Ideophones are a class of sound symbolic words expressing human sensation that are used as literary devices in many Central African languages. Since the subject matter of Songs of Songs is particularly conducive to the use of ideophones, there are a total of 30 ideophones in the Gbaya Bible in that short biblical book alone.

See also snow (color).