[..]How and when did you come upon the idea?
Years ago I was studying Cuban batá drumming. There is a lot of theory in written notations available. When I was taking classes in Havana, I realized that there’s a huge difference between playing batá from the sheets, referring to a beat or a musical bar, and how the locals perceived the rhythms (a classical topic for ethnomusicology). I could join in, but lacked the swing. I decided for myself: if I really wanted to develop a feeling for this genre, I would have to listen to it repeatedly, as the people growing up there had done. Dozens of Cuban batá recordings on the market made it easy. It became my constant background music. The results were satisfying. At the end I was able to hear a rhythm and immediately could respond to the calls of the drum, without naming the rhythm or knowing whom it was played for. I forgot to think about beats or bars, I had the phrases in my mind. I played first, and thought about it later! The same technique I used to learn Spanish. I downloaded audio courses, the market is enormous. I hardly can sit down and study with a book, it is too boring. Instead, I had the courses with me on my ipod. Wherever I went, I would listen to it, without concentrating. I read about grammar in books, but did not do any exercises. Over time, the phrases became part of me, I could use them correctly in various situations, without thinking about it. That’s why I called this course Yorùbá Melody: for me it is very much like learning a song, or music. Once you know the basic patterns, you can start to improvise later with these bits and pieces and play around. Unfortunately, for Yorùbá language there is just one pure audio course available, with words like “pizza” or “grapes” (yes, really, “girépù”). So I had to do it myself. As I am just a Yorùbá student, I had to involve a professional with a passion for Yorùbá culture – you![...]
I remember when I was working with a Yorùbá informant from Nigeria, we recorded some words that were not pronounced correctly. I was explained that Èṣù Ọ̀dàrà comes from “ò dárá” – “Eshu, the wicked one”. Especially names of local Orisha or their greetings are hardly known. Many Yorùbá do not know how to pronounce them or make up other meanings for òríkí. Dialect versions exist, like “Yorùbá” and “Yòrùbá”, or “Oògùn” and “Òògùn”. I learned that more variants are in use, but only one became the official standard.
Yes, there is a standard, and there are variants. The reason why it seems harder today is that the orthography hasn’t been sternly enforced. The language isn’t taught in schools anymore, so you’ll likely get even more divergent dialects and forms as time goes on. Hopefully, our effort goes some way to deal with some of these issues.
I also realized, while studying the Ifá corpus, that Yorùbá has lost so much of its language over time. There are several words and terms in the odù ifá that are no longer used in contemporary language. There are some words whose meaning I don’t know, words or phrases you’d never hear in common usage. So, in the case of “ọ̀dàrà”, I’d more likely err towards “Èṣù, one who makes wonderful/fascinating things”. But even that is likely wrong, because the etymology of the word is now almost lost to us. And there are many other words like that.
One of the things I intend to work on in 2018 is a crowdsourced dictionary of Yorùbá, a multimedia one like YorubaName.com where we can pool the knowledge base of the Yorùbá citizenry to document our language and all its variants. You’d be surprised how much more you can learn when you listen to people from different parts and persuasions.
The typical Yorùbá literature available today on the Nigerian market was written in the 1960s or 1970s. Often without diacritics, or just when necessary – what makes them kind of useless for language students who should train the pronunciation. I would love to have some of these books in re-editions! Your father Ọlátúbọ̀sún Ọládàpọ̀ is a well-known Nigerian author and cultural entrepreneur, so I guess you could get the copyrights for novels like “Ògún Lákáayé”. Wouldn’t it be a great project to publish this in contemporary, correct Yorùbá orthography? I like the „Left page English, right page foreign language“ kind of books to study…
It’s actually a good idea, the play. A while ago, I tried to do a translation of the play into English, but stopped when I realized that some of the parts of the play can’t translate well into another culture. So an adaptation will work better, with changes made to some of the characters, scenes, and dialogue. Also, to take some liberty in criticizing the author with whom I’m intimately familiar, I think the play didn’t break new grounds, as a piece of literary drama. It seemed to have played it safe with the a familiar story. Compare it to a play like Death and the King’s Horsemen, for instance, and you’ll see what I mean. The handling of the poetry, the conflicts, and the resolutions, are very different. It will be nice to be able to rework it, in English and Yorùbá, but with a couple of modest and sometimes radical changes.
But to your point, yes, I’ve noticed, while reading books like Ògbójú Ọdẹ, for instance, by D.O. Fágúnwà, that the orthography is quite different. There were a lot of liberties taken with tone marks on nasals and on mid tone vowels. It would be nice to be able to re-do those works in modern orthography, without any changes to any other part of the work itself. Even the Yorùbá bible is due for a modern re-write.
The problem, I think, with the printing presses of those days was that it needed extra work to place the diacritics in the right places. So the authors just simply omitted that, and, often, inserted it by hand in the final print, which was then mass-produced. So you see a book like Egúngun Among the Ọ̀yọ́ Yorùbá by S. O. Babáyẹmí which has, right on the cover, hand-inserted diacritics on the vowels. Same for inside the book. I guess one can say that technology hasn’t been great for African languages for a very long time. Microsoft Word, and Google, only took it up from there.
I am looking forward to this new book project! It also reminds me on another article I wanted to work on… Yorùbá language keeps us busy! I just want to add that the Yorùbá Melody Audio Phrasebook is licensed under Creative Commons Copyrights. People are free to share the files and can make them publicly accessible on their own websites, homepages of Orisha associations, language institutes or play them in their radio shows or podcasts. As long as the use is not commercial and they give appropriate credit - and mention our two websites below. The course is made to be shared in the community and give people a first impression of the original language.
Yes, I agree. There is a lot of work to be done, and I look forward to being of help in a number of different ways. Thank you for the initiative, and for all the sleepless nights put in to ensure that the end result is as good as it can be.
I wish that people worldwide enjoy the course as much as I did, while I was working on it. I am an enthusiastic supporter of the high art of passive learning. Repeated listening gets the phrases into your brain. Is there something better than an Audio Course for a tonal language?
I have come around to understand that this is a very effective way to learn a language (though it’s hard to listen to my own voice after a while). I hope it encourages even more people not just to learn Yorùbá but to make visits to Nigeria, interact with these important cultural and religious spaces, and undergo an immersive experience.
Have fun, and we are always happy about hearing back from our listeners and readers!
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