I had a colleague in my last employment whose name was “Osokomaiya”. I’m deliberately leaving that unmarked for tone because that was how I first encountered it. But when I started hearing it pronounced, there were variations, from “Oṣókòmaiyà” to “Ọ̀ṣọ́kòmaiyà”. The latter is correct, by the way, but I also didn’t know it at the time, confused by the different ways in which the name was rendered to my uninitiated ear.

Last week, I asked him for the meaning of the name. After a few hours of waiting, he sent his response. The name, he said, meant “Adornment does not catch me unawares”: Ọ̀ṣọ́ ò kò mí l’áyá, which more accurately can be interpreted as “Adornment doesn’t overwhelm me.” It is an Ìjẹ̀bú name, but the etymology makes it likely to be borne in Ìjẹṣà and Èkìtì precincts as well.

What fascinated me about the discovery, however, was how knowing one name suddenly opened up another. For a while, a name “Olúkòmaiyà” had stayed queued up in our dashboard awaiting indexing. But because no one could figure out what it meant, it had remained there in waiting. By solving “Ọ̀ṣọ́kòmaiyà”, Olúkòmaiyà was easier to figure out: “Prominence/leadership does not overwhelm me.”

So I’ve been thinking of the process of decoding the meaning of names as similar to the process of solving a puzzle. What makes a puzzle interesting is that one clue usually leads to another and to another, until everything that once seems difficult opens up with ease. The example of Ọ̀ṣọ́kòmaiyà was only the recent one. A while ago, I had a similar experience with a name “Ariyehun” which, where I first encountered it in writing, seemed Yorùbá, but whose outward appearance lent nothing about its meaning until clues came from very unlikely sources.

Where I grew up in Ìbàdàn, one of our neighbours had a daughter named Ọlátóún. Until I became an adult, I had no idea what the name meant. So one day, while working, I found an entry in an old dictionary that defined it as “Wealth/nobility is worth rejoicing over”: Ọlá-tó-hún. Until then, I had no idea that “hún” was a Yorùbá word, and that it meant “rejoicing” or “celebrating” as it did in this case. The name Tóún is a typical Ìjẹ̀bú name, which explains the relative obscurity of the meaning, if not the name itself.

Figuring out what “hún” meant made the meaning of “Ọláníhún” even clearer. Even though it is a name that is borne almost all around Yorùbá land, most people (sometimes even those bearing it) have found it hard to break it down to its component parts. Or maybe I speak only for myself. In any case, it was now easier to understand either “Ọlá-ní-n-hún” (Wealth/nobility asked me to rejoice/celebrate) or “Ọlá-ní-ohun-hún” (Wealth/nobility has found something to celebrate). Either way, the puzzle was solved. Same for Adéníhún, etc.

So, one day, I returned to “Aríyehún” and the problem was solved without much effort. It is “a-rí-iye-hún: one who sees mother(s) and rejoices” and it made all the sense in the world. Also an Ìjẹ̀bú name, this turned out to be the direct equivalent of the name bearing the same meaning in standard Yorùbá: “Aríyàáyọ̀”. Many more names with “hún” in them fell open without any push, like “Aróyèhún”, a name I would have pronounced differently had I not encountered the relevant background information.

Maybe this is why I enjoy working here, on names. Rather than reach for a 3×3 Rubik’s Cube and solve a puzzle I’ve solved many times over, it is sometimes more delightful to sit back and try to understand the working of Yorùbá names, many of which I’ve taken for granted for a number of years. I’m sure it feels the same way, perhaps even with more pleasant rewards, in other languages.

What is your experience?