It was sometime between 2001 and
2012, in my Senior Secondary School days, I was in a somewhat heated argument
(well, not exactly – more like making a case) with my Yoruba teacher on why she
was wrong and I was right about the way an essay in the examination and
subsequent questions on the essay were wrong. The essay in question had a lot
of the word “Igbe” which I automatically corrected in my head as “igbo” based
on the context in which they were used while I read through the passages and consciously
corrected the same word on the question paper and in my sheets while answering
the question.
After my ranting and self-elevated
speech about my prowess in Yoruba language second only to that of Oduduwa, my Yoruba
teacher simply finished me with this statement “Shey o tii gbo ni pa eran Igbe
ri? Ta ni o be e pe ki o so igbe di igbo nigba ti ohun dahun ibere na?” She
went on to give me zero in that particular question. Now here is the thing, I
was right and so was she, the two words were appropriate in the context of the
essay presented and questions asked, but the problem was the frequency and
context of use of one word in our daily spoken Yoruba viz-a-viz the other.
Another issue was the clear difference between spoken and written words,
speaking a language is massively different from writing the same language and
automatically affects reading a language, it might surprise you to know there
are people in America who can speak English but cannot write in English but
that is a story for another day. The third issue probably has to do with the
fact that the elders are always right in the Yoruba cultural and she just had
to shove that in my face lol.
You may wonder why all these
epistle and reminiscing, I came across a project spearheaded by Kola Tubosun
which will preserve the heritage of the Yoruba language albeit starting from Yoruba
names and their meanings, the project is also poised to feature pronunciations
of these names, stories behind the names and the oriki attached to the names. It
is quite a novel project and one which I am pretty excited about because it
reminded me of the incident I narrated above which later made me one of the
closest students to my Yoruba teacher in secondary school, it also points to
the fact that Nigerians are not being left out of the digitalization going on.
I cannot wait for the websites to
launch, my first wiki post will be about the joke I throw around when people
ask for me name in an informal gathering, your everyday Temitope becomes “Temitopenitorioluwaloseyifunmi”
and the next question that follows is “How did you write Jamb with such a long
name?”
To read more about the project
please visit www.yorubaname.com and www.orukoyoruba.com or this blog post on TechCabal.
You may also contribute to the project financially by visiting this Indiegogo
page.
NB:
- My understanding of "Igbe" was sh*t, thus i translated it to "Igbo" which means "bush"
- “Shey o tii gbo ni pa eran Igbe ri? Ta ni o be e pe ki o so igbe di igbo nigba ti ohun dahun ibere na?” - "Haven't you heard about Bush Meat before? Who told you to 'igbe' to 'igbo' when you were answering the question?"