The Yoruba Language

THE YORUBA LANGUAGE The Yoruba language has been classed among the unwritten African languages. The earliest attempt to reduce this language into writing was in the early forties of the last century, when the Church Missionary Society, with the immortal Rev. Henry Venn as Secretary, organized a mission to the Yoruba country under the leadership of one of their agents, the Rev. Henry Townsend,. an English Clergyman then at work at Sierra Leone, and the Rev. Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the first African Clergyman of the C.M.S., also at work in the same place. After several fruitless efforts had been made either to invent new characters, or adapt the Arabic, which was already known to Moslem Yorubas, the Roman character was naturally adopted, not only because it is the one best acquainted with, but also because it would obviate the difficulties that must necessarily arise if missionaries were first to learn strange characters before they could undertake scholastic and evangehstic work. With this as basis, specizd adaptation had to be made for pronouncing some words not to be found in the English or any other European language. The system, or rather want of system, existing among various missionary bodies in Africa and elsewhere emphasized the need of a fixed system of orthography. It was evidently essential for the various bodies to agree upon certain rules for reducing iUiterate languages into writing in Roman characters, not only because this would facilitate co-operation, but also because it would render books much cheaper than when separate founts of type must needs be cast for every separate system (scientific or otherwise) that each body may choose to adapt for one and the same purpose. In this effort, the Committee of the C.M.S. were ably assisted by certain philological doctors, as Professor Lee of Cambridge, Mr. Norris of London, and notably by Professor Lepsius of BerUn, to whom was entrusted the task of establishing a complete form of alphabetic system to which all hitherto unwritten languages could be adapted. The following remarks are largely derived from the second edition of Prof. Lepsius' work. The Professor consulted earher efforts that had been made in India and elsewhere to transliterate foreign (Eastern) characters into the Roman, and out of the chaos then existing he estabUshed on a firm scientific basis the Standard Alphabet in which the Yoruba language is now written. This was adopted by the C.M.S. in 1856. By this system therefore former translations had to be transliterated under certain fixed rules. The number of letters in the Standard Alphabet is necessarily very large, as it was designed to meet the requirements of all nations ; but with diacritic marks on cognate sounds and accents, and the introduction of three characters from the Greek, the Roman characters furnish all that is necessary from which every unwritten language can draw. It is very unfortunate indeed that the system has not been faithfully followed by all, for reasons we regard as inadequate and inconclusive. This has provoked the caustic remark of the distin- guished philologist. Dr. R. N. Cust, that ..." no class of man- kind is so narrowminded and opinionated as the missionary except the linguist." For even in the Yoruba which professed to have adopted Lepsius' Standard, certain particulars (as we shall see) have been departed from, by no means for the better. Keen was the controversy on these points between the English and German missionaries of the Yoruba Mission in its early days. In the following'pages the style commonly used in the familiar Yoruba translations is departed from in some important particulars, as they present some peculiar defects which ought to be rectified. We shall endeavour to follow Professor Lepsius' Standard Alphabet as closely as possible. The Professor himself has conceded that shades of sound can be adapted therefrom to meet special requirements without depart- ing from the principles laid down. Says he in his second edition: " The exposition of the scientific and practical principles according to which a suitable alphabet for universal adoption in foreign languages might be constructed has (with few exceptions above mentioned) remained unaltered. These rules are founded in the nature of the subject, and therefore though they may admit of certain carefully hmited exceptions, they can undergo no change in themselves : they serve as a defence against arbitrary proposals which do not depend upon universal laws ; they will explain and recommend the application which has been made of them already to a series of languages and will serve as a guide in their application to new ones. "But we have not concealed from the very beginning that it is not in every person's power to apprehend with physiological and hnguistic accuracy the sounds in a foreign language or even those of his own, so as to apply with some degree of certainty the principles of our alphabet to a new system of sounds containing its own peculiarities. A few only of our most distinguished grammarians are possessed of a penetrating insight into the living organisms of sounds in those very languages they have discussed ; much less can it be expected of missionaries, who are often obliged without previous preparation to address themselves to the reduction and representation of a foreign language, that everything which belongs to a correct adjudication of particular sounds (frequently apprehended only with great difficulty even by the ear) or to their connection with one another and with other systems of sounds, should present itself spontaneously to their minds." Certain rules of transcription are imperative for a correct scientific method of procedure. Whatever may have been the difficulties encountered in the ancient written languages, so far as the Yoruba and other unwritten languages are concerned, the field hes clear. The Enghsh mode of pronouncing the vowels had to be rejected in favour of the Italian or continental mode. The following rules or principles have been laid down:— 1. The power of each letter as representing certain sounds as handed down from antiquity should be retained. 2. The orthography of any language should never use (a) the same letter for different sounds, nor (b) different letters for the same sound. In violation of (a) note the force of the letter g in the Enghsh words give, gin ; of a in man, name, what ; of ea in treat, tread ; of ei in weight, height ; of the consonants ch in archbishop, arch- angel ; of augh in slaughter, laughter; also the sound of ch in chamber, champagne, chameleon where the same letters are used for different sounds. In violation of (b) note the last syllables in the words atten/fow, omission, fsLshion, where different letters are used for the same sound. 3. Every simple sound is to be represented by a single sign. This is violated by writing sh to represent the " rushing sound " of s. This, as we shall see below, is quite unnecessary in the Yoruba language. Here we find an application of the principle that where a new sound is not found in the Roman alphabetic system a diacritical mark on the nearest graphic sign should be used. A diacritical mark therefore over s will more fitly represent the English sound of sh. ^ This is also in accordance with the sin and shin in the Hebrew and Arabic, where the difference 1 Publishers' Note. It must be noted, however, that in printing this work s has been used throughout to represent the sh sound. between the soft and the rushing sound is indicated by diacritical points, e.g., Heb. to tD Arab. - ^ Again the letter A is a sign of aspiration (as the spiritus asper in the Greek) as in it, hit ; at, hat ; owl, howl, etc. It would therefore be unscientific to accord it a new meaning altogether by such a use of it in violation of rule i. Apart from this is the fact that the letter s with a diacritical mark over it has been employed about twenty years previously by oriental scholars transcribing Indian letters into the Roman. 4. Explosive letters are not to be used to express fricative sounds and vice versa, e.g., the use oi ph as f where p is clearly an explosive letter. 5. The last rule is that a long vowel should never be represented by doubling the short. This method seems to have found favour with some transcribers, there being no fixed system of transcription. THE ALPHABET In a purely scientific alphabetic system, it would seem more correct that the alphabets be arranged according to the organ most concerned in the pronunciation of the letters, e.g., all sounds proceed from the fauces, and are modified either at the throat, by the teeth, or by the lips ; hence they may be classified as guttural, dental, or labial. But nothing is gained by altering the order which came down to us from remote antiquity as the Romans received it from the Greek, and these from the Phoenicians, etc. The Vowels. The vowels in Yoruba may be built upon the three funda- mental vowels, a, i, u, with the two subsidiary ones, e formed by the coalescence of the first two a and i, and o by the coal- escence of a and u from which we have a, e, i, o and u. These are the recognised principal vowels and are pronounced after the Italian method (ah, aye, ee, o, 00), but whereas in the Enghsh language the short soimd of e is written eh and that of o as aw. these sounds, according to the standard system in accordance with rule 3, are represented by a dot or dash under the cognate sounds, hence we have e and o. A complete representation of the vowels in Yoruba therefore is as follows:—a, e, e, i, o, g, a (prpnounced ah, aye, eh, ee, oh, aw, oo), the original taking precedence of the diacritic. Note that u is not to be pronounced as " you " but as oo in food. Nasalization.—The clear vowels are capable of a peculiar alteration which is produced by uttering the vowel through the nasal canal. There is no consonantal element brought into play, but it is an alteration entirely within the vowel. Nasalization is very largely used in the Yoruba, and consequently its ortho- graphy should be free from any ambiguity. In the Standard Alpha- bet the circumflex (~) is placed over the nasalized vowel to indicate such a sound. Unfortunately the Yoruba as written by mission- aries substitute the letter n for this sign, a cause of some ambiguity in writing certain words as Akano, Akinola, Morinatu, Obimeko, where the letter n stands between two vowels, and is liable to be pronounced with the latter, e.g., A-ka-no, A-ld-no-la, MQ-ri-na-tu, 0-bu-ne-ko ; but following the Standard Alphabet, the words should be written Akao, Obueko, just as the Portuguese names are written Semao, Adao, JoSo, etc. Indeed certain sections of the Yoruba tribes that use nasalization very sparingly do pronounce these words as written without any sign of nasalization. The n therefore is not only unnecessary but it is also misleading. In the following pages, the Standard System will be adhered to, where such ambiguities are liable to occur: but for the sake of simplicity and to avoid the unnecessary use of diacritical marks, n as a nasal sign may be used where it cannot cause any ambiguity, e.g., 1. When it precedes a consonant as nje, ndao, nk6. 2. When it closes a word, as Awon, Basorun, Ibadan, Iseyin. As nasahzation is said to be caused by the dropping of a nasal consonant, such a Umited use of « as a nasal soimd may be justified. No pure, uneducated Yoruba man can pronounce a word ending in a consonant, he will instinctively add an i or u to it. There is therefore no closed syllable in Yoruba, n at the end of a word is purely nasal. The System of Consonants There are sixteen distinct consonantal sounds in the Yoruba language, each having the same force and power as in the English alphabet; they are : b, d, f, g, h, j, k, 1, m, n, p, r, s, t, w, y. No consonants are used to represent a vowel by perverting them from their legitimate consonantal sounds as h, w, and y are some- times used in English. Besides the above, there are two other sounds not represented in the Roman or in any other European system ; they are ex- plosive sounds peculiar to the Yoruba and alhed tribes formed by the lip and jaw, viz., gb and kp. They are regarded as guttural modifications of b and p, and as they appear to result from a combination of two organs concerned in speech, but the com- ponent parts of which are so intimately connected they are rightly represented by two letters, though not contravening rule 3. As to kp, since usage makes it evident that the Yorubas never pronounce the letter p but as kp, it is therefore not considered necessary to include kp in the Yoruba alphabet as is done in the Ibo ; the simple p does perform its duty satisfactorily. Here we find a fit application of Professor Lepsius' remarks that " The general alphabet, when applied to particular languages, must be capable of simplification as well as of enlargement. All particular diacritical marks are unnecessary in those languages where none of the bases have a double value ; we then write the simple base without a diacritical mark. Where two sounds belong to the same base, one only of the signs will be wanted. ..." This is well exemplified here. We therefore write p and not kp in Yoruba. The same may be said of the letter s and the sound sh, referred to above. The difference is indicated in the Standard Alphabet by a diacritical mark, e.g., s, s (for sh). The Yorubas can safely dispense with the latter, and for the sake of simplicity this ought to have been done, as no difference as to the meaning of a word is suggested by the same word being pronounced soft or harsh. And more also because in some parts of the country, notably the Ekun Osi district (the most northerly), the harsh sound is un- pronounceable, whatever may be written ; e.g., shall, shop, will be pronounced sail, sop. In the Epo district, on the other hand, it is just the reverse ; the harsh sound will be pronounced instead of the soft, thus same, son will be pronounced shame, shon. But all over the country women and children invariably use the softer sound for the same word, which, if thus used by men is considered affectations, except in the Ekun Osi district, where the purest and most elegant Yoruba is spoken. S (for sh) therefore might have been dropped from the Yoruba alphabet with no harm resulting ; it is, however, retained because over a great part of the country a distinction is made between the two sounds ; apart from the fact that it would often be required in representing the sounds of some words of foreign origin. From the above modifications therefore we have the Yoruba alphabet as now used:— abdeefggbhijklmnooprsstuwy . Accents or Tones An accent in the accepted sense of the term denotes the stress laid upon a particular syllable, be it the ultimate, penultimate or antepenultimate syllable of a word. In Yoruba it is used differently. What are called accents, and for which the usual symbols are used are really tones, of which there are three: the elevated, the middle and the depressed ; for the first and the last the acute and the grave accents are used respectively, the middle tone in its simplest form requires no accent sign. In Yoruba, vowels are of greater importance than consonants, and tones than vowels ; hence the peculiarity of this language, that musical sounds can be employed to convey a correct idea of words in speech. Another error into which those responsible for the present mode of writing Yoruba have fallen, by departing from the Standard System, is the introduction of the circumflex (~) and its indiscrimi- nate use as a sign of a so-called long vowel. There are really no long or short vowels in Yoruba as under- stood in the English language ; what appears to be long is the coalescence of two or more vowels with an elision of the inter- vening consonants, e.g., Bale is a contraction of Baba-ile, i.e. father (or master) of the house. Here the second h is dropped, the two a's coalesce, and the i is absorbed in them, being represented by a prolongation of the tone. The vowels are therefore simple and compound. The meaning of a word varies as the tone, e.g., we may say :— ba ba, bk, the voice being raised, even or depressed respectively. The first ba means to meet, the second ba to he in ambush, and the third hk to ahght upon. So we may have be, be, b^ : b§ means to split open, be to be officious, and b^ to beg. Also bu, bu, bu: bu means to abuse, bu to be mouldy, and bu to cut open. In this way each vowel with each tone accent may be combined with each of the consonants to form words of different meanings ; or in other words, thus may every consonant be used with each of the vowels in turn, forming different words by varying the tone. The Use of the Accents To this method of using the accents over the vowels Professor Lepsius made the strongest objections, as by such a use the accents have been diverted from their proper uses to serve another purpose. He therefore proposed to place the tone accents to the right-hand side of the vowel instead of over it, so as to distinguish a word accent from a tone accent, as is done in the Chinese and other cognate languages: e.g., word accent would be written ba, bk; tone accent, ba, ba\ In this proposal the professor agrees with the Rev. T. J. Bowen an American Baptist Missionary in his Yoruba Grammar and Dictionary published in 1858 by the Smithsonian Institution. But Crowther—a Yoruba man—did not in his grammar make any such distinction. He thinks the existing accents will do well enough, and for the best of reasons, there is no word accent in Yoruba, the tone governs everything, and Europeans cannot speak without a word accent. The language moreover abounds in contractions and elisions, a whole syllable may be dropped but the tone remains. This is the crux of difficulty with foreigners trying to speak the language, and to what extent they are able to overcome this, to that extent their Yoruba is said to be perfect. Combination of the Accents As remarked above, there are no closed syllables in the Yoruba language, every syllable must end in a vowel and every vowel must be one of the three tones represented by the accents. Words of three or four syllables are often contracted into two, the coalescence of the tones forming the compound vowels. The entire scheme of the accents or tones may be thus repre- sented:— I. Simple vowels with the varied tones. a, in which the tone is raised: as ka, to pick ; ba, to meet; la, to lick, a, in which the tone is even : as pa, to kill; ba, to ambush ; ta, to kick. a, in which the tone is depressed : as rk, to buy ; ki, to count; fa, to draw. II. Compound vowels in which a single vowel bears more than one tone :— A. Compounds of the raised tone, a, in which the raised tone is doubled, e.g., A'yan, contracted from Arfyan, i.e., cares, worries. 4-, in which the raised tone is combined with the middle, e.g., Ki-nla from Kinila—a form of exclamation. & in which the raised tone is combined with the depressed, e.g., beni from b^h^ni, so it is. B. Compounds of the middle tone. a' in which the middle tone is combined with the raised ; e.g. A'yan from a-hayan, a cockroach ; O'ri from Oriri, a tomb, a" in which the middle tone is combined with itself, e.g., Ta'ni from Ta-ha-ni—who is it ? a' in which the middle tone is combined with the depressed, e.g., E"ru from eriru, spice ; kere from keh^rg, a screen. C Compounds of the depressed tone. k' in which the depressed tone is combined with the raised, e.g., a'nu from cini-inu, mercy; 6'to from 6tit6, truth. k- in which the depressed tone is combined with the middle, e.g., ko"'^^ from kdriko, a wolf. i' in which the depressed tone is combined with itself, e.g., Ori contracted from Oriri, black plum. In this way words of four or five syllables may, by elision and absorption, be contracted into two or three ; e.g., «ifin from aw6fin, the palace ; hence Alafin from Ani-k-w^-fin, Lord of the royal palace. 0-oni fromOw6ni, which is itself a contraction of Omo oliiw^ni, son of a sacrificial victim. The consonants may be dropped, the vowels absorbed, but the tones are always preserved ; the first and last syllables only are essential, the voice can gUde over all the intervening tones for the sake of shortness. This is at once the chief characteristic and—to foreigners—the main difficulty of the Yoruba language. In order to avoid such complicated tone accents it would be preferable to write out the words in full, although the contracted form may be used in speaking or reading, e.g., otito for 6'to ; korik6 for k6"'"'' Words similar in form, distinguished only by their tones. Words of two syllables:— Api . the arm Ina .. fire, louse Apa . a prodigal Ink .. flogging Apa . a scar Lia .. a tattoo mark Aid . a riddle Idi .. the eagle A15 . something ground \di .. the seat Alo • going Idi .. bunch of fruit Awo . a dish llii .. a town Aw6 . a crash m .. a drum Aw6 .. a fishing net llu .. a gimlet Awo . a guinea-fowl Awo .. a secret Agba .. a rope lya Agba .. an elder lya Agba .. a cannon lya A'yan .. anxiety, care Ik6 A'yan .. a cockroach Ik6 A'yan .. a hardwood Ikd Baba .. father Ori Baba (adv.) quite full Ori Bkbk .. guinea corn 6ri Epo .. palm oil 0p6 Epo .. bark Op6 Ep6 .. weeds Opd E'ri .. corn chaff Oko E'ri .. dirt Okg Eri (for Ori) the head 6k6 Words of three syllables similarly Apata .. a rock korfko Apata .. a shield k6rik6 Apatk .. a butcher a mother punishment a separation a cough a state messenger a hook or hanging the head shea butter black plum a post a widow to be busy a husband a hoe a spear distinguished:— grass wolf Words of four syllables. Koldkdlo .. stealthily Kolgkolo .. circuitously K^16kolo .. muddy, miry K616k^l6 .. the fox