Category General | Yoruba Name

August 31, 2016 by Kola Tubosun

On Lukumi Inclusion on YorùbáName.com

Lukumi/Lucumi is a version of Yorùbá that survived the Middle Passage and has continued to thrive in Latin America particularly in Cuba. It shares several attributes with standard Yorùbá in phonology and lexicography with mild differences in spelling and tone. You can read more about the differences and similarities here.

At YorùbáName.com, we are committed to an inclusive work that takes into account all variants of Yorùbá in Nigeria (Ijẹ̀ṣa, Ìjẹ̀bú, Ìlàjẹ, Ondo, etc), as well as other variants from Francophone West Africa (Benin, Togo) to Anglophone West Africa (Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana) to Latin America (Brazil Cuba, Jamaica, etc) and even to Arabic. We’re always looking for lexicographers/scholars who are able to help facilitate this inclusion. Names from Benin Republic are already being added thanks to the work of Laila Le Guen and Dr. Moufoutaou Adjeran. (More about that here and here).

Photo from OrishaImage.com

As from this week, users of our dictionary will notice new names common to Lukumi speakers in Cuba. Thanks to the work of Nathan Lugo who is a scholar of the language (and a practitioner of Yorùbá religion) in collaboration with our lexicography team, we are adding all Yorùbá-Lukumi names in pursuit of our desire for a comprehensive work useful for all Yorùbá speakers, descendants, and enthusiasts everywhere.

The spellings will be unfamiliar to local Yorùbá speakers (Obbá, Oddualá, Echudiná, Oyeboddé, etc) but to those who bear them in the diaspora, they’re properly spelled and marked in the tradition of their Yorùbá ancestors. At YorùbáName.com, you will be able to identify them by spelling and peculiar tone (accent) marking, and also by our geolocation tag foreign-general.

What our lexicographers are doing along with Cuban scholar Nathan Lugo is to ensure that variants of the name in West African Yorùbá are also listed, for the benefit of both diaspora users as well as continental ones. This complementary exchange will, hopefully, improve the quality of interaction between the two communities separated by hundreds of years of history, and a large body of water.

July 8, 2016 by Laila

Yorùbá Name on the road: University of Ibadan

On 1^st July, Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún and I were invited by IFRA Nigeria to present the Yorùbá Name project at the University of Ibadan. As I’ve been contributing remotely from Nairobi and other places, I could never have imagined how warm the response from both students and professors would be. It’s one thing to be told that people at UI are taking the project to heart, it’s another to sit in front of a room full of knowledgeable, passionate Yorùbá speakers loudly debating the breakdown of the name Sójìmí. If this is what linguistic research allied to technology can do, I definitely want more of it!

Beyond the heart-warming feeling of speaking to an enthusiastic audience, our trip to Ibadan was a great opportunity to establish links with a dynamic university community, and UI didn’t disappoint in this regard. We left convinced more than ever that the geolocation of names is going to be of crucial importance to establish patterns, due to the dialectal distribution of the Yoruba language. This was illustrated in particular by a couple of names from Ondo State that had previously eluded the Yoruba Name community, yet were well-known to some participants from this area, who could explain their meaning and origin. This observation certainly highlights the need for finer research into local naming practises in the various regions where Yorùbá is spoken.

One underlying current behind all the questions and comments that kept us engaged until time ran out, was how personal the project felt to participants. Some worried about how ‘funkifying’ one’s name could affect the course one’s destiny as inscribed in the name given at birth, while others recalled the long road they had taken to understand the meaning of their names and it seemed that all had a sense of how meaningful a name can be.

After hearing a few personal accounts of how a person’s name came to be, I have become increasingly interested in listening to more such stories, because meaning is never univocal. Instead, it is found in carefully peeling back the layers to gradually expand the perspective: first the combination of words that form the name, then the deeper signification of this utterance in a particular context. And there is more. In there is the back story of a person’s birth which is a family history, ensconced in a vaster community of memory. A website such as this one can never capture all these family histories criss-crossing the bigger canvas of History, but it can probably do a little to help those looking for a clue.

I left Drapers Hall with a renewed desire to continue devoting time to this project, to follow these threads of meaning across language and time and to keep on learning from all the people I meet along the way.

The full report of the Drapers Hall event can be found here on the IFRA website.

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February 22, 2016 by Dadepo Aderemi

What is in a Beta?

At about 10:30 on February 19, 2016, the Yorubaname.com dictionary became fully accessible to the general public.

This enabled users to not only search and view names in the dictionary, but to also submit names and suggest improvement for already published names.

The release on February 19, 2016 was the beta release of the Yorubaname.com dictionary, the result of about one year of active development.

What do we have in the Beta release?

We have a functional website for the dictionary, and a dashboard application to manage the names in the dictionary.

For a bit over twelve months, the Yorubaname development team has been neck deep busy, bringing to life the core functionalities that will be needed to run a name dictionary.

Little by little we saw the features slowly taking shape and about 2 months ago we agreed that the core foundation for the dictionary had been laid. We had made enough progress to have a functionally working dictionary although we might not have finished building all the features we wanted.

And this is what this Beta release is about: it signifies that the dictionary is now usable, with its core foundation laid, providing the groundwork for us to work on future features and improvements. I will quickly touch on some of the core part of the dictionary that is now functional with the beta release.

We now have a functional website
The Yorubaname dictionary is available at Yorubaname.com. It is the public facing part of the dictionary. In the beta release users can:

Search the database for names
View the details of names if already present in the database
Submit a name, if a name is not present
Submit feedback to names already published

Search the database for names
At the homepage at Yorubaname.com, a user can start their name search experience, by typing in the name in the search box. We provide an auto-complete feature to aid with this:

Auto-complete view

The auto-complete feature shows the first 5 entries that match what is being typed it is in no way a list of all the names in the dictionary. The user will know if a name exists by just pressing “enter” after entering the name, even if it does not show in the auto-complete bar.

Should a user have a specific name in mind, and know its tone marks, they would be happy to know that this beta version has an onscreen keyboard to help make their search as exact as possible:

Onscreen keyboard

Another alternative to aid with tone-marking is to grab the Yoruba keyboard layout we made for Windows and Mac users here.

View the details of names if already present in the database
When a name that has already been included in the dictionary is searched for, the user would be redirected to a result page with details like below;

Name details view

The name entry page shows the following attributes of a name:

Meaning and extended meaning
Its morphology and gloss
Geo location, i.e. region a name is mostly found or where the name originates
Media links and famous people who bear the name
Variants to the name

Power User tip: you can try searching the database not just for a name but also using an English word…for example search for “love”…this is part of a feature we are working on, a sort of baby name finder, that allows parent to find the perfect name for their kids by specifying certain attributes.

Submit a name, if a name is not present
If per chance the name you are looking for is not in the database, do not despair: we have a functionality that allows the user to submit a name. Our lexicographers would see the suggested name and work on adding it to the database.

Name not found view

Submit name view

Submit feedback to names already published
If a user thinks something is not accurate about a name, or some part of the attributes can be improved, then the user can contribute to making our dictionary more accurate by leaving a feedback for the name.

Submit feedback

names can also be listed alphabetically:

Alphabetic listing of names

This basically provides an overview of what we have worked on, with the beta release at Yorubaname.com. Next up is the back office: where I provide a brief overview of what comes with the beta release in terms of the dashboard application.

We now have a functional Dashboard

The website at Yorubaname.com is the public side of the Yorubaname dictionary, and is the major point of interaction for users. However, the past twelve months of work have not solely been about building this public facing side of the dictionary, we have also worked on the dashboard application: the part of Yorubaname.com used by lexicographers to manage the name entries in the dictionary.

Dashboard home page

With the beta release, we have been able to build the following core functionalities into the dashboard.

Ability to add, modify, and delete names in the database
Ability to publish names, which is the act of making names in the dictionary available to be seen on the dictionary website
Ability to see all the feedback given by users to name entries
Ability to see and react to names submitted by users
An access control system that allows admins to control what lexicographers can do and not do within the dashboard

Here are some screenshots of how the dashboard looks

Entry view

Add/Modify view

Suggested names view

Although a lot of work has gone into creating a very functional dashboard as of today, we have plans to make it much better in the coming months.

After a Beta, what’s next?

A lot.

The beta release was definitely a milestone, but it does not in any way mark the completion of our efforts with the Yorùbá Names Dictionary. There is still a lot to do and we are ever pumped up to continue what we have started.

Our backlog is bursting with interesting features, yet to be implemented: like the baby name finder tool I hinted at.

Apart from the new features, activities are on-going to refine the ones already implemented. Other things in the pipeline include a “Text to Speech” feature, which will give users the ability to hear the pronunciation of the listed names.

We will also be making the dictionary itself more wiki like, so as to enable more collaborative editing of name entries by users. Also, we plan to work on internalization which will allow the dictionary website to be available in other language apart from English. The list of the features still left to be built is almost endless and the interesting work is just beginning!

Another thing we would also like to do, moving forward, is to have the development of the application more in the open. This would involve us making our backlog public and moving the code base for both the dashboard and website to a public repository (most likely Github). This would be the first step towards having an open source tool out of the efforts of Yorùbá Names Dictionary, with the next step being extracting the core of yorubaname.com into a separate codebase.

Why open source? We believe and hope by making the software part of creating a dictionary (either for names or otherwise) available, we would be able to inspire others to create similar dictionaries, thereby contributing to capturing and preserving the wealth of knowledge that may be in languages that are not readily represented on the world wide web.

We wish to congratulate all who have been part of this journey thus far: the developers and volunteers who have helped in various capacities and the supporters who backed up the Indigogo fund.

Truth is…a ṣẹ̀ṣẹ̀ n mú ẹyẹ bọ̀ l’ápò ni.

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January 16, 2016 by Kola Tubosun

We Need Beta Testers

As we said in the last update, we are opening up the dictionary database to you because it has reached a stage where more hands (and eyes) can help us spot issues we may have missed over the past couple of months. You will have just two weeks for the beta stage and we hope that you enjoy every part of it.

By giving you access to the dashboard, you will be able to do the following:

Add new names to the database. One of the first things people do when they reach the dictionary homepage is to search for their names, the names of their loved one, or a name they love. We will expect that you’d do the same. If the names are not there, you will be able to add them to the database, even if you don’t know everything about all its attributes.
Improve existing names in the database. If the names are there but don’t have all their attributes properly listed, you will have a chance to edit the entry and add all the relevant information necessary. Your submissions will be sent to the administrators who will then approve it for the public.
Suggest changes to the dashboard, homepage, and other functionalities. The work we currently have is not perfect. It will always be a work-in-progress. But our role from now on will be to improve it to be as great as it can possibly get. And for that reason, you will have a chance to let us know what part of the project needs to be improved on, especially before the public launch. Our tech hands are on site to fix any issue raised.

If you are interested in being a beta tester for the Yorùbá Names Dictionary, please send us an email at project@yorubaname.com with “Beta Tester” as the subject. If you can, also, send us a few lines about yourself and your motivations. There are giveaways (including Yorùbá Name T-shirts and postcards) for selected volunteers, but we hope that being a part of this phase of the project will be a sufficient-enough motivation at this stage.

Thank you. We look forward to your mails.

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January 15, 2016 by admin

Mark your calendar: the complete pre-launch schedule

The time you’ve been waiting for is now almost here! We are ready to show our work of the last one year to you, our public.

Here is an outline of our launch schedule:

Internal Testing: January 4 – January 17 | We are currently testing the dashboard with our in-house lexicographers. Their feedback will help us fix all the bugs in the machine before we open it up to you.
External Beta Testing: January 18 – January 29 | At this phase, we will open the platform to a few volunteers (that may include YOU) who want to see what the dictionary looks like, before it is fully launched. If you’re interested in providing feedback on the beta version of the site, send us a mail at project@yorubaname.com with “Beta Tester” as your subject.
Countdown to Launch: February 9 – February 18 | After a last round of troubleshooting, we begin a 10-day countdown to launch which will include an engaging social media campaign. We have selected ten random names from our database to be showcased as a sneak preview of the dictionary. We also hope to use these ten days to invite you to tell us (1) about your own name and what it means, and (2) about a name you would give your child if you had a chance, and why.

There will be a number of giveaways during this time, including YorubaName branded items (t-shirts, postcards, and other surprise gifts). Please keep an eye on this space for more information about our launch, which will take place both online and in Lagos.

There will also be plenty of opportunities for you to get involved, wherever you may find yourself at that time. So, stay tuned.

Update: The date for the launch has been moved to Friday, February 19 to maximize the exposure of a weekday. The post-launch activities will continue on Saturday February 20th into International Mother Tongue Day, February 21st.

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December 31, 2015 by Kola Tubosun

Countdown to Launch

Thanks to all you supporters, donors, volunteers, and users, our work on this project has now reached a testing phase where we put finishing touches to the program in preparation for launch. We will soon open it up to the public where it always belonged. Shortly, we will send out a timeline for our public launch/presentation and information about how you can help us spread the word, and to participate in the work from now on into the future.

A few days ago, I was in Ilé-Ifẹ̀ to, among other things, put plans in motion for a coming field trip to help us gather plenty name data from that historical town and its environs. Part of our future goals at YorubaName.com is to be able to visit towns and villages around the country in other to gather peculiar names and stories from people in the area who have kept them in their oral history for generations.

A strong supporter of the project, the Ọọ̀ni of Ifẹ, Ọọ̀ni Adéyẹyè Ògúnwùsì (Ọ̀jájá II) showed great interest, gave audience and promised relevant support. With the help and support of other traditional rulers in Yorùbá towns (and other cultural gate-keepers), we will surely meet our desired aim of creating a product of lasting cultural and linguistic value.

Our database currently contains over three thousand names, and this is just the beginning. We hope to reach ten thousand and beyond. The infinite creative nature of Yorùbá naming system ensures that we can never truly exhaust the list of names in the country, but we can surely try. As soon as we launch, it will be up to the users to improve on each entry, and swell the database to as large a scope as possible. And who knows, it may be time to begin again in another language.

Here is a quote from the Ọọ̀ni: “It is an absolutely phenomenal concept that will keep the Yorùbá culture and language alive. It has my full support.”

The tools of information technology have made it easy to curate this kind of artistic and cultural content across different physical spaces. One of the most acclaimed things we did in 2015 was the release of the Yorùbá keyboard for Mac and Windows, free. Over 200 people have downloaded the software and can now properly tone-mark their words. If you haven’t done so, feel free to do so too, and share with a friend. This coming year, we hope to create the software in even more web and mobile platforms.

So, in a salute to all of you who have supported us from the beginning, and all those who currently work – in their free time – to ensure that the project continues to thrive, here’s a big Ẹ seun púpọ̀ for your unflagging commitment, and a toast to an even more fulfilling 2016.

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December 25, 2015 by Laila

Can you help this couple pick the perfect Yorùbá name for their baby?

“Many Google searches around Yorùbá names emanate from future parents who are looking for a beautiful name for their child, a name that will reflect their values and their personal journey to parenthood. One such couple reached out to us a few days ago, sharing their story of cross-cultural love and their desire to find a unique combination of names representing all of their child’s heritage.

Read on to find out if you can help them on their quest for the perfect Yorùbá name!

Obi and Tọ́lá* spent nearly their whole lives in the UK and moved to Lagos a few years ago to pursue career opportunities. 2015 has brought the couple wonderful news: they’re expecting their first child! Like any parents-to-be, they are faced with many decisions, one of them being the choice of their child’s name. The baby’s gender isn’t known yet but Obi and Tọ́lá have already made up their minds about one thing: his or her names will be a compound of Obi’s Igbo and Tọ́lá’s Yorùbá culture.

After much online searching, Obi and Tọ́lá haven’t quite come across the kind of Yorùbá name they’re seeking…The YorubaName dictionary hasn’t officially launched yet but that doesn’t mean we can’t help them find a great name!

Here are some of the criteria your suggested name(s) should meet:

Easy to pronounce. Though both parents speak their respective languages, they weren’t exposed to enough Yorùbá and Igbo to be able to master every single sound and they find longer, more complicated names difficult to pronounce. The name shouldn’t include any ‘gb’ sound, lest aunties spend a great many hours correcting the parents on the pronunciation of their own child’s name!
Straighforward spelling
Not so long that it would be routinely shortened
Ideally an uncommon name. Avoid beginnings such as Olú… Olúwa… Adé… Bàbá etc.
Obi and Tọ́lá are not keen on names referring to wealth, or focusing on the parents’ life, feelings and struggles. They would like a name whose theme solely celebrates their baby.

In case some more background might help you find inspiration, you should know that both parents are Christians and that the baby is going to be the first grandchild on the mother’s side and the third on the father’s side. If a girl, the baby will be the first female grandchild in the family.

Crowdsourcing a name is so 2016! Send your name ideas to project@yorubaname.com, message us on our Facebook page or tweet us @yorubanames. You can also drop your comments below. Thanks in advance for all your contributions!

* To preserve the couple’s privacy, we didn’t use their real names.

Update 03/06/2016: Obi and Tọ́lá’s little girl was born a few days ago. They chose the name Tiwanìfẹ́ “Ours is love”.

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December 19, 2015 by Laila

The week in links

The Yorùbá name of the week is…

Májà ‘Do not fight’.

Here is a roundup of links we shared on social media this week:

On the blogs

The Yoruba blog published a complete photostory of the coronation of ọba Adéyẹyè Ẹnìtàn Ogúnwùsì

If you’re in Lagos, check out the Susanne Wenger Adùnní Olórìṣà Trust exhibition currently showing at the Wheatbaker Hotel in Ikoyi: photos, drawings, paintings, and other works of art by Òsogbo and Òsogbo-influenced artists and about the sacred Òsun Òsogbo Grove are on display.

Blogger Alákọ̀wé has a new video series, in which he takes the viewer on a tour of various London neighbourhoods with commentary in Yorùbá.

Language

The Android app Kasahorow has recently added Yorùbá to its supported languages. You can now type Akan (Fanti, Twi, Akuapem), English, Ga-Dangme, Gbe (Ewe, Ewegbe, Fon), Gikuyu, Hausa, Igbo, Wolof and, yes, Yoruba on your device!

For language enthusiasts, the World Atlas of Language Structures is a fantastic resource, including visualisations of various aspects of language. For instance, here is a map representing the distribution of tonal languages in the world, based on research including 527 languages.

Et pour les francophones…

Dans un article de 1969 paru dans la revue ‘Etudes Dahoméennes’, Machioudi Idriss Dissou retrace l’origine de quelques familles yoruba de Porto Novo à travers leurs oríkì.

Have fun reading!

What else happened this week in your corner of the Internet?

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August 7, 2015 by admin

Yorùbá Keyboard Layouts for Mac and Windows

Hello YorubaName blog readers and supporters!

A couple of weeks ago, we promised to release Yorùbá Keyboard Layouts to help users of African languages on the internet place tone marks and subdots with the least possible number of keystrokes.

These keyboard layouts for Windows and Mac are here now!

They are designed with love to make typing in these languages as easy as possible. There are certainly other solutions out there, especially on Windows, to type letters with subdots as well as tone marks needed for Yorùbá, Igbo, and many other tonal languages. However, there is a clear advantage in offering both layouts with very similar key combinations for consistency, focusing on the letters “h” and “l” on the keyboard for “high” and “low” tones respectively. The mid-tone is usually left unmarked in most languages.

We hope you’ll have a fantastic time typing anything that takes your fancy.

Download it here.

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July 20, 2015 by Laila

From the Community: Names Explained by Their Bearers

What is the story of your name? The answer to this question is always deeply personal, touching on family history.

We asked community members to email or tweet an interesting story about their name, with no format restriction. Though the contest launched about a month ago was titled ‘My Name, My Story’, upon reading the pieces, it becomes clear that it would have been more aptly dubbed ‘My name, Our Story’, so deeply embedded they are in a larger context.

Two of the winners have already received their prizes, a YorubaName.com T-shirt…and sent back photographic evidence !

Below are excerpts from the winning entries.

Stephen Adewale Oluwarotimi Ajayi

My names are Stephen Adewale Oluwarotimi Ajayi.

From the moment I could read and write my mother never missed the opportunity to tell me how special I was to her. She had gotten married at a young age (as they all did back then) but was unable to bear a child for my father in the first 6 years. She was getting pregnant though, just wasn’t able to carry to term.
In the 7th year of her marriage I came. Oh yeah, my father came from a line of Adeyemi’s, which means ‘the crown befits me’ so he instantly named me Stephen, which according to my findings means ‘crown’ and then he added Adewale, which means ‘the crown has come home’.
The 6 years drought my mother had, had taken her through a deep journey in seeking her spiritual self and when she ‘took-in’, carried to term and had me (a bouncing baby boy) she immaculately named me Oluwarotimi, which means ‘the Lord stayed with me’. This is a compound name, so to speak, the second part being ‘Rotimi’ (I find this name so soothing), which means ‘Stay with me’. This I did till she left us to the Lord.

Olanrewaju

My name is Olanrewaju. Olanrewaju means ‘honour is continuing’ or ‘honour is moving forward’. (…) At birth and naming, it was glaring that honours continued coming to my father and the entire family as a whole.

My father was a palm wine tapper, he became the head of the tappers (in Agbado/Agidingbi, present Ogun state, Nigeria) in the late 1930s. He left wine tapping/selling to become a stationery and book seller in Jankara market, Lagos state. This business grew from kiosk trade to shop and later departmental store in the late 50s. All this while, only female children were born, with only a male out of the eight.

In the wake of Nigeria’s independence in 1960, my father came home to the village (Iludun-Oro, Kwara State) to give his house a modern architectural facelift. Three years after independence, on August 1st, 1963, I was born, the much awaited male child had come!

Abiodun Temitope Ayotunde Omowon Idowu

Abi’s parents, living in London at the time, had one child before they were advised that, due to medical issues, another pregnancy would pose a severe risk to her mother’s life.

Eight years later, while curled up in the arms of my father in bed at night, my mother had a dream where she saw her father-in-law, dressed as a woman in high fashion and with an ample bosom and he called her name and told her that he was returning to her and that she was three months pregnant and that he would return as a girl, fair of skin and dark of eyes and though men would find her appealing, she would struggle to pick one as a mate.

My mother woke up and while she was struggling with how to tell my startled father who was wondering why she was shaky, the phone rang and my father was informed that his father had passed at midnight. My mother then told my father her dream after he had calmed down and he went and got a pregnancy test kit. It was positive.

As my parents made plans to come for the funeral, my mother convinced my dad to make the move permanent as she was terrified that she would be made to abort her baby. Father agreed and they came home finally and three months and three weeks later I was born in Lagos, premature but strong and healthy and I was immediately named Omowon (a child is rare).

I now have two other siblings. My eyes are dark and a bit fair of skin and though I have been engaged four times, I am yet to pick a mate.

[Abi hasn’t claimed her gift yet, which is why we couldn’t feature her photo on the blog post.]

Although the contest has now ended, we have not stopped receiving emails. Do you have any peculiar story about your name? Send them to us at project@yorubaname.com. We’d love to read (and possibly share) them. We are not definitely promising you a t-shirt for your efforts but you can never know…

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