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Browsing the archives for the Linguistics category.

Will Yoruba Survive?

To @MrBankole, who asked:

I’d like a brief comment, if you don’t mind… (on) your thoughts about the future of (Yoruba’s?) cultural legacies and how they interact with evolving mediums of expression. Do you think they’ll erode…or will they be preserved? Living, breathing, or digital fossils.

I’ve heard many versions of this question before, but this one is about whether the new means of communication (with their inherent tendency for language imperialism) will (or not) send Yoruba, or perhaps any other language with such limited use off the map completely.

I believe, of course, that they will survive. The question however (always) is “in which form?”

The Yoruba language lives today in Candomblé, a religion in Brazil, and in Cuba as Santería. Some of the cultures of the old Gold Coast have remained in Jamaica and some other parts of the Caribbean in sometimes recognizable bits, or sometimes in totally evolved forms. This is the inevitable fall-out of language and cultural transposition. As dead as Latin is, it still lives on in science and in the Catholic Church. The point is that even in the worst case scenario, there will still be a recognizable part of the language left.

So, if in a couple of hundred years, Yoruba survives only in this (electronic) medium through the use by those who remember particular registers from their own childhood and nothing more, we may be left only with that: a Yoruba customized for a medium and a particular kind of audience. An e-diolect, if you will. Over time, as it happened in Brazil and Cuba, the chasm will increase and the distance between the original Yoruba from root and the e-volved Yoruba that lives on in the medium will increase to perhaps an unbridgeable length, with few exceptions.

Or not. (We never really know. Language is dynamic and their survival/destruction is often subject to other issues than just mere technological advancements. Maybe a war will take place and destroy all Yorubas in Nigeria, and the only surviving bits of the language will be those spliced with English and all the other acquired languages we’ve imbibed.) But these are hypotheticals.

I don’t believe that the original Yoruba from the motherland/hinterlands will ever completely disappear from the earth (just like English never will as well). But I believe that all things being equal, they will evolve, differently in speed – of course, depending on their medium of transmission (and the types/number of people that use one kind over the other).

Thank you for the interaction, Lord Banks.

PS: The Speak Yoruba Day on Twitter is still March 1, 2013. It is a chance to showcase the facility of the mother tongue and its relevance to the 21st century.

Bring Flowery Back!

My best moments from the movie Lincoln (which I have now managed to see after many weeks of pining in Lagos) were the parliamentary sessions where lawmakers debated and offered their opinions on the proposed Thirteenth Amendment.

I have not yet seen the full movie Iron Lady, but the parts I have looked forward to the most (from what I’ve seen in the trailers) are the bombastic debate scenes in the British House of Parliament. It is unquantifiable, the pleasure of the spectacle: lawmakers jousting with their best verbal weapons to the loud cheers and jeers of their audience. No doubt like the Roman Senators that long ago predated them, the congressmen made language beautiful to hear, and its use (for ill or for good) pleasant to behold.

Here is one from the real life British Parliament

The example in the movie Lincoln was a little disconcerting for me to understand since the American Presidential system (as opposed to the British Parliamentary system) has made it such that debate in the House of Representatives – being deliberately representative – is now much more decorous than the movie portrayal. What happened in the intervening years? The loss of the power oratory? Political correctness after the many years of political assassinations? Laziness? What?

Here is another example from the Jamaican Parliament, sent to me by a friend:

Beautiful, isn’t it?

If I had a magic wand, I would turn all world democracies into Parliamentary systems, if only to squeeze out of their lawmakers (and thus representatives of the language and culture) the last juice of their lingual soul almost always laid bare in the moments of fiery legislative debates on the floor of the house. As per the United States, look no further to the present constitution of the Senate and the House of Reps. The last time one of them tried to interrupt the president with a two-word interjection, the whole country went into a collective apoplexy. (See Wilson, Joe).

As far as Nigeria is concerned, the last great hope for such grand language use is the former Rep. Patrick Obahiagbon (See below). Not half as flowery as the British Parliamentarians (but far more entertaining, and consistent than his fellow Reps in the Nigerian House), and sometimes wrong in the usage of the heavy words he had chosen as vessel for his bombastic performances, he carried the flag for as long as he could until he was voted out.

We should bring flowery back.

I thank Lincoln for this (however unintended) incentive.

On the Origin of Names (V)

There is a place on one of the major islands in Lagos called “Sandfill”, a place that most likely has never always been called that (since it might not even have existed before it was created out of the Lagos Lagoon). It was most likely called Sandfill because a large part of it was reclaimed from the waters through the process of sand-filling. Many parts of the Lagos islands are currently undergoing that kind of creative enlargement through reclamation from the water. However, take any public transport in Lagos today (especially ones run by the largely uneducated bus drivers and conductors), and what you would hear as they call passengers going to this direction is not “Sandfill” at all, but “San’ field” (or “Sand-filled”, or “Sandfield”).

I have long wondered about this process of organic nomenclative (if the word exists) behaviour. In my many walks around the world of visiting places of significance, the process of naming – and the etymology of words over time – has always held a tremendous fascination. A place in Southern Illinois, a few miles from where I lived for a few years, was called “Effingham“, a name that meant nothing much to many of my friends until I asked whether it was a purified version of something more risque from an earlier time. Then it made sense. When I moved to Lagos, I heard about another place also a few miles from where I now live, called “Olókó nla”. Like Effingham, I broke into a giggle the first time I heard it, half thinking it was a mistake, and that no one would dare name their place “The Owner of a Big Penis”. The case for ambiguity is plenty. After all, one of the mischiefs we indulged in in primary school was forcing our classmates to repeat “My Father Has a Big Farm” in Yoruba, with a view to leading them into the wrong pronunciation of “Oko” (farm) so that it sounded like “Okó” (penis), and get a big laugh from the class. The only way “Olókó nla” would make sense is if it were originally “Olóko nlá” (The Owner of a Big Farm) before mispronunciations (perhaps due to the multi-ethnic mix of the Lagos metropolis), mischief, perhaps illiteracy, and/or the convenience of colloquialism, dispensed with the old, original pronunciation, and left the world with the latter. I have been in public transportation many times in which young or old women tried to tell the driver where to let them out by yelling “Olókó nla”. It has always been hard to suppress a giggle.

The transformation of “Sandfill” into “San’field” or a variation of it is a problem mostly of illiteracy (and an interesting phonological phenomenon). The bus transport workers most likely are unaware of the reason for the name. A similar problem of contact between people of different languages gave us “Oke Sapati” and “Oke Paadi” in Ibadan, where “Sapati” is a bastardized form of “Shepherd Hills” as the colonial officers once called it, and “Padi” is the Yorubized form of “Padre”. A similar simplification has changed people originally called “Mohammed” to Momodu, “Abubakar” to Bakare, “Isaac” to Isiaka, “Badmos” to Badamosi and a number of many names that have now become decidedly Yoruba as a result of appropriation, and inadvertent imposition of the Yoruba phonological pattern on the imported word. Yoruba does not take consonant clusters, so any imported word must decidedly take on a new vowel whereever a cluster once existed. So “bread” becomes buredi, “brush” becomes buroshi, “brother” becomes buroda, and an easy one “handset”, when imported, becomes han’seti, among many others.

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The pleasure of names and nomenclature are open to those interested in their exploration, as I have found. To many to whom names are just pointers to direction and nothing more however, it won’t matter one bit if Alausa was originally “The place for Hausas”, or “The place for walnuts”. Yet as history shows us, the etymology of a word/place plays a significant role in the historical understanding of that place. A few years ago, the Oba of Benin wrote a book in which he claimed that rather than the other way around, it was actually a man from Benin who migrated to found Ife and become their king long after the successful expansion of the Benin kingdom. To support his point, a number of linguist friends pointed to the cognate possibilities of Ooni (the name of the Ife king’s title) being descended from Ogene, and not the other way around. Language, after all, always tended towards simplification, and a word once called Ogene (high chief) is more likely to have simplified to become Ooni over time. The Ife history tells a different story however, claiming that Ooni is a simplified form of Owoni.

There is not much to end this with as lesson other than submit to the dynamism of the process of naming. In cases like Olókó nla, it might lead to legitimately fun anecdotes. By some luck, when signposts spring up in Lagos in the future that point to that place as “San’Field”, or maybe even “Sanfeld”, some people would still be alive who would remember how the original name first came about. Like Nigeria from “the Niger Area” as Lord Lugard’s wife first thought it, it would have been worth the birth of just another word in the language.

From the Icarus Event (Photos)

Ibadan, November 3, 2012, at the event to honour the winner of the 2012 Caine Prize.

Photos from the event.

A Day in the Life

My way to work every morning takes me through a myriad of winding lanes through the veins of Nigeria’s former capital city, Lagos.

I wake up at 5am.

The alarm clock on my phone as well as that of my wife* ring both at once, separated by just a microsecond, and I get up. The games we play is to plan to be the first to get up before the other places the ringing phone next to the other’s ear.

Like clockwork, I must head to the bathroom in the next two minutes, sometimes spent on my phone checking for missed calls from the US, or unreplied emails on my phone. She nudges me again, and I head to the bathroom.

In twenty minutes, I am back in the room, this time dropping fresh warm bath water on my hair and on my feet. She has placed my clothes where I can easily reach them, a very romantic gesture. A white shirt, a black tie, and a grey pant. Another day is a different combination of colours that leave me entering every class looking as distinguished as I could ever look. I smile, talk about a few interesting things I forgot to tell her yesterday, while I dry myself, put on clothes, and get ready. Must be out of the house latest by 5.30am. And that’s getting late. At the door, I give her a kiss and promise to get home early, and get out of the house.

My path through Lagos is a winding one through all its throbbing lanes. But at a quarter to six, in usually the first or second BRT (Bus Rapid Transport) bus out of the gate at the park, the roads are just waking up. In less than fifteen minutes from then, the city begins to fully wake to the promise of day.

We go through Ikeja, close to the famous airport, then get to Oshodi, a once notorious spot filled with all manner of commuters and market men and women. Dawn wakes in a distance, and the bus plows through. In a few minutes, we are on Ikorodu road, saved for a couple of minutes by the presence of a designated lane for the BRT buses marked with Yellow. We sometimes get to Iganmu, site of the National Theatre (built in 1977 to mark the Festival of Arts and Culture: FESTAC), driving on the bridge that puts the military-cap style of the theatre against the backdrop of a distant skyline of the Lagos Islands. On another day, we find ourselves on the Third Mainland Bridge (Africa’s longest bridge that ends up at CMS near the first church building in Lagos, belonging to the Church Mission Society.)

It is on this bridge that I encounter one of the most enduring images of my last couple of days: sillhouette images of fishermen on canoes going to work, sometimes riding in a formation, sometimes not. But usually, without fail, moving with the dawning day into the far reaches of the dark Lagos Lagoon. At 6.30am, all I see is the shapes of men and young boys paddling slowly into the morning. Here I am, an “educated” middle class “elite” in the Nation’s commercial capital heading to work. And there they are, the fishermen whose livelihoods depend on the benevolence of the waters. It is morning. We are all going to work: me, in a fast-moving vessel of the Lagos State Government heading onto the Islands, and them – from wherever far away in the darkness – into the depths of the waters to find sustenance.

I make a mental note as we go along. I wonder whether the small handheld Canon I just pulled out to take a picture of the dawn along with the canoes was able to see anything. In many cases, it only made me the centre of attention in a bus full of work-faring passengers like me, not yet buoyed by breakfast or a morning coffee. That happens at work.

“How is madam?” used to be the first greeting I receive at work. Now it’s like the second. “How was traffic today?” has replaced it. Sometimes it is, “I hope you didn’t get wet from the rain.” We fraternize like long lost brothers. Make jokes about each other’s appearance. Sometimes we share anecdotes about difficult students, then we disperse to individual offices to prepare for the lessons of the day. I have the first two periods – usually the best time to teach young boys anything, before their irrepressible energies sublimate into the most cantankerous behaviour. An hour and half later, I am downstairs at the school cafeteria for breakfast. Today it is coffee with sugar. No milk. And bread with corned beef and mayonnaise. Tomorrow, it might be ogi and akara. A few members of the academic staff are here, and we laugh and share some more small-talk.

I go back to class to teach, this morning, the subject of argumentative essays. I tell them the importance of having control of the subject, and being able to anticipate the points of the opposition. I ask them about the debates between President Obama and his competition. A few saw it. Some thought that the president won, and some rooted for his opponent. A few students – having seen some doomsday poster/calendar sold under the bridge at Oshodi tell me that Obama was the antichrist. “He has signed 666 into law, and now there are chips being placed into people’s foreheads.”

I shake my head in incredulity and laugh at the folly of the student. He asks me if I am a supporter of the president, and I decline to immediately answer. I tell him that I could oppose the president and still believe that what the doomsday calendar said was just the feverish imagination of smart/desperate Nigerian preying on the gullibility of the average Nigerian. A couple of students laugh at the student, implying that he had been getting information from a grossly unreliable source.

We discuss how to write an essay. I give corrections of past exercises, and tell the students that all of them had made mistakes of beginning their essay with “Dear Panel of Judges, dutiful time keeper, co-debaters, and fellow students…” An essay, as opposed to a debate – takes place on paper, and there are no time keepers or panel of judges. We deal with the necessary points, I give them another exercise, and the class ends. There are three or four more classes during the day, lunch, and a staff meeting where we intend to discuss an upcoming performance of Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not To Blame by students. By 4pm, I’m on the way back home. The traffic of the Lagos roads, beginning at this time of the day towards this direction, promises about two and a half, to four hours on the road.

By this time, it seems the whole of the state are on the road, each private car containing one or two passengers. The distance to the next BRT bus park is about half an hour, and it goes through Obalende. At the end of the bridge that comes from Bonny Camp, tapering towards the Tafawa Balewa Square at Onikan, is an extension of the Lagoon. By the side of the bridge, on the floor of the pedestrial sidewalk, with a lesser look of stress on their faces than the one I now carry along with the passengers of this small bus, are fishermen and some women. In front of them are big pieces of fish of different species. I have spotted large tilapias most of the time. Before the night is over, they will most likely have sold enough to be happy with on the way back to their families.

Tomorrow at dawn, they will be back on the canoes, heading into the deep under the Third Mainland Bridge. Tomorrow at dawn, I shall be on that bridge on the way to work taking pictures of their silhouettes in the dark. Tomorrow, they shall observe us well dressed Lagosians and project the hopes of their children making it to the big stage as middle class “elites” in tie and suits. And tomorrow, I shall look at them from afar with an understandable wonder and affection, of those who work – in rote no less, and in no less dedication as I – to feed their family and secure their future.

The only similarity we would have is the stress on our back muscles when we slouch back at dusk into the arms of our loving wives.

______

* On September 22, 2012, I married my fiance in Ibadan.

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