ktravula – a travelogue!

Documenting African Names

I’ve always been fascinated by names, and I can’t say since when. I’ve also always been fascinated with technology. It was no coincidence then when, while researching topics for my undergraduate project at the University of Ibadan, I settled on creating A Multimedia Dictionary of Yoruba Names. It was the first undergraduate project in the department (and, I hear, in the university) which made use of only electronic materials. There was no hard bound copy of any written material. Everything was hypertext and audio, burnt onto a compact disk. For audio I had the help of friends and colleagues to obtain fluent Yoruba speakers willing to help pronounce these names that formed the bulk of the audio database. Then, with my little knowledge of html, I designed an reference interface to access the sounds. Users could click to hear a name pronounced, or they could merely look up a name to discover the meaning.

I found the project stimulating to work on, hard as the challenge of audio recording was, sometimes across two continents, but it gave me great pleasure, and something worthwhile to work on at that time when academic endeavour as a student looked like a chore with no silver linings. It helped to have had a couple of published materials to use, but researching the meaning of names proved interesting enough to mitigate the boredom of the final years of school. I got my degree, and left the university, with a niggling desire at the back of my mind to one day return to the project in a larger form. The choice was either to find money, call up some of the original collaborators and do it again, this time without the constraints of a university environment, or to simply pursue it as a solo side project. The reality turned out to be that because of other commitments, I would never be able to individually pursue it as a solo project anymore.

Time and chance has kept me in the orbit of project and vocations that relate to African (Yoruba particularly) languages and culture, and my masters thesis focused on the problems and peculiarities of learning Yoruba tone as a second language learner/speaker. Growing up as a monolingual speaker of English in Europe or America, how easy is it to learn Yoruba (or any other tone language for that matter? Mandarin, Vietnamese, Igbo etc). The result of my research yielded fascinating insights to second language learning and acquisition and I have sworn to return to that research as well at a later date. Scholars who have dismissed the possibility of monolingual English speakers to learn and master tone at a second language level will be disappointed by the challenge posed to their premature conclusion.

The reason I have been interested and involved in these things (beside the obvious one of it being in the orbit of my profession as a linguist) is my consternation at the absence of enough cultural materials online from this (Yoruba) and many other African cultures. In this century when most of what is knowable (particularly about Western culture and civilisation) is online and accessible to everyone, it is appalling that Africa seems to be left out. True, most of our cultural information are oral and thus based in the memory of griots and other living libraries scattered around our hamlets. This however can’t be an excuse to shy away from the tools of new technology to document them for future generations. Foreign media who need to pronounce names of African celebrities resort to Anglicizing them without consequences. If a Nigerian can pronounce “Krauthammer” or “Schwarzenegger” or “Spielberg” or “Reagan”, why would folks like Chiwetalu Ejiofor (as the Igbo will spell and pronounce the name) need to change their names to “Chiwetel” in order to get by in Hollywood? In this video from The Tonight’s Show, British actor of Nigerian origin, David Oyelowo tries to teach Jimmy Fallon how to correctly pronounce his Yoruba name.

In a world where linguists and cultural practitioners from Africa do their jobs well, Jimmy Fallon would have had to consult a dictionary of African names online and learnt the correct pronunciation before his guest comes on the show. He would do that for a Swedish guest, after all, no?

My life’s work then, it seems day after day (as I’ve found myself gradually gravitating towards) is to find all the ways possible to make the African experience part of the world experience, using tools provided by information technology. But not just that, it will also include making technology friendly and accessible to Africans who would otherwise have been put off by its alien language and lack of enough user-friendliness. Between 2012 and 2014, we successfully petitioned Twitter to allow the platform be translated into Yoruba. This was a huge victory for language survival and a testament to the open-mindedness of the folks at Twitter, recognizing the ability of the platform to be even more efficient in the hands of more people, and in more languages.

My current project is to document ALL Yoruba names, by crowdsourcing, along with their etymology, meaning, phonetic/morphological properties, and all other stories and cultural dimensions to them. This time, we’re trying to make not just a dictionary, but a resource centre with dictionary, encyclopedic, and linguistic/multimedia information. I am raising funds on Indiegogo to meet the goal of creating the software backbone of the project and we have got a number of volunteers and goodwill. The larger aim is to kickstart a process that will lead to an awakening, and an eventual movement by all concerned, to put more effort in the documentation of our cultural experience in spite of the onslaught of a type of monolcultural globalisation that only leaves us bereft of any signpost of our identity and place in the world. Not just for Yoruba, however, but for all African languages. But we have to start somewhere.

If you believe in this dream, please go to the project page on Indiegogo to donate whatever you can. Every dollar counts.

What is Your Name? Video and Dance

Here is a beautiful video by Femi Kayode Amogunla on names and contemporary attacks against it by ignorance and amnesia. Also, poetry, drums, and dance.

Read more about the artist here.

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.

On the Origin Of Names (IV)

I came upon an interesting realization today that the Yoruba cultural system has solved for the world long before now, one of the most pressing issues of predestination. I should preface this, perhaps, with a disclosure that my undergraduate university project was called The Multimedia Dictionary of Yoruba Names. I have been fascinated with the concept of naming and the thinking processes that go into them since a very long time. According to the Yoruba belief system, a child is named usually with a view in his/her potentials as well as the conditions surrounding his birth. Read more here.

The Western world, however, is a different case entirely, depending on a totally arbitrary system of child-naming. Not only is there no special day when the name of the child is declared to the world, it is perfectly acceptable to call someone Lemon or Bush, or Focker, Iron or Stone. I mean, what were the parents thinking? A few months ago, Congressman Anthony Weiner became a news item not just for what he did wrong, but for how his name had not served as a warning to anyone around him since he was a kid. A last comment on strange associations will go to the strangeness of calling people who practise same sex associations fruits. I’ve never understood why this is the case, but when CNN’s first openly gay man happens to bear the name of a real fruit, it makes one take a second look at serendipity. (No slight intended here, seriously).

I do not want to cheapen this subject so I’ll stop here. But let’s hear what George Carlin has to say: “Soft names make soft people. I’ll bet you anything, that ten times out of ten, (guys named) Nicky, Vinnie, and Tony would beat the shit out of Todd, Kyle, and Tucker.” I return to Yoruba roots where everything has already been patiently explained. Ile la n wo k’a to so omo loruko. A name is not just a name. A rose called by any other name might not always smell as sweet, so if you are naming one, be careful not to name it after a killer bee or a poisonous cantaloupe.

(The three previous precursors to this post are also worth checking out. Check the “related post” section down below.)

On The Origin of Names (III)

Two days ago at the office, a faculty member and I sat by the computer in the language lab to put in names of students billed to take the SOPI test next week. The SOPI is a Simulated Oral Proficiency Interview that is meant to test the proficiency of said students in a language in question, this time Spanish. All, or most, of the students were Americans. To save time, I volunteered to type in the names and generate a username and password for the students while she wrote down the passwords against the names of the students so that when the time came for them to take the test, all they’d need to do would be to log in and begin.

The problem began when she started calling the names. I – a sometimes overconfident believer in my own ability to pronounce and spell any name as long as it is pronounced correctly – stared however into the screen confused each time I wrote out what I heard of a name, and my colleague told me that I’d written a totally different thing from what is correct. First there was Shawn which I thought was “Sean”, then Tiffannie which in my mind could only have been “Tiffany”. When she called “Lindsi”, I thought she meant Lindsay, and I wrote it, only to be corrected once again that the name is written just as it pronounced, and not Lindsay. And there came the others: Kathryn, Catherine, Kathrine, Brittney, Brittany, Lindsey, Devan, Devon, Kaitlyn, Cathlyn, Caitlin, Katelynn, Elisabeth, Elizabeth, Ashlee, Ashley, Megan, Meagan, Staci, Stacy, Alexandre, Alexander, Kelli, Kelly, Halle, Haley, Jasmyne, and Jasmin. Of course, before we finished typing in all the names, I’d simply given up on trying to type them from sounds. I would listen, and then peep into the student register myself in order to see how the names are spelt.

The occasion reminded me of so many instances in which my name is misspelt by many people who one would expect to know better. I remember very many exasperating moments in school in Nigeria where an overzealous teacher or secretary would insist on putting another “n” somewhere in-between my last name just because some other variation exist with that kind of spelling. A few months ago – last year – when I returned to my home university in Ibadan to pick up my long overdue certificate, I found out that they had written my last name on it with their own spelling in mind, and they had kept it for me since 2005, waiting for me to come pick it up. Since the document itself had started to look aged from dust and poor keeping, it was very convenient for me to complain as loudly as possible that the name written on it actually doesn’t belong to me. When I was in Kenya in early 2005, I remember having a similar discussion with a friend of mine, co-traveller from Nigeria, whose last name was Olarewaju but who had almost always had to deal with people who (by their own assumption of correctness) always insisted on writing it as Olanrewaju, the most conventional spelling.

So, here I am in America – the land of the free, with liberty and a thousand name variations. It used to be hard enough to accept people’s inherent laziness to even try to pronounce one’s name as soon as they just see that it is a foreign one – even if that name is “Amory”, as my room mate from Philippines said to me a few weeks ago. All they have to know is that you are a foreigner and your name suddenly assumes a certain difficulty to pronounce that wasn’t there before. I have always attributed it to laziness and an inability to even make an effort. It’s not as if the letters of said names were brought out from the sky. I understand not being able to write down a name you hear because of ambiguities that I myself have acknowledged above, but not being able to pronounce ones already written must require a certain level of intellectual laziness.

To encounter names and variations from this new angle of spelling, for me, makes for an interesting humbling, and a realization that in the end, man’s need to confound himself with his quest for identity really transcends geographical or linguistic boundaries. This explains why, sometimes in December, the editor of a Faculty publication insisted over our email conversations that instead of writing my name as simply Kola Tubosun as I had advised, she would write it in full along with the tone marks. She was afraid that, by asking her to write my name without the marks, I was compromising the integrity of a meaningful name for the convenience of American pronunciation. We eventually settled on a compromise: “Kola Tubosun, born Kóláwọlé…” and that was how it appeared in the publication. Her insistence touched me and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

Now, having been on the many sides of this naming experience, I don’t know how to conclude. Maybe there’s not even a nice summary to it, except that when next I meet someone whose name is Chris, it might be better to ask him first if his begins with a “C” or a “K”.

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