Language

April 15, 2018  by

It’s Time for an Online Yorùbá Dictionary

At least once a week these days, someone tags me on a post on Facebook, or on a tweet, asking for the meaning of a Yorùbá word. Often, it will be a word I know and I can help explain. In other times, it would be a word of whose meaning I’m not sure, or of whose meaning I’d been searching myself for a while. In the latter cases, I re-share the query to my friends, colleagues, and social media acquaintances, and in a few hours, we are usually able to find the meaning. It is usually an experience that leaves me more educated or enlightened than I previously was.

Over the last couple of years, as my reputation grew online as someone, even if mildly, competent in Yorùbá language, culture, and lexicography, so has the frequency of these interactions all around social media, with friends, and often times with random strangers confident that my knowledge would be enough to save the day or point them in the right direction. It’s not a totally misplaced confidence (since, even when I’m ignorant, I have sufficient background and connection to find what they’re looking for, or direct them to the right place), but it had also eaten into my own personal space and time.

And so, a few years ago, after we launched YorubaName.com as a first multimedia dictionary of names, the idea of another multimedia dictionary of Yorùbá language began to weigh in my mind. It was disturbing that there was no reliable place online where one could find the meaning of Yorùbá words. There are printed dictionaries with varying competence, scattered websites, and projects all around the web for sure, but none of them was comprehensive, free, easily accessible, and with a multimedia component. This last part has turned out to be very important in helping those who use YorubaName.com figure out how the names are pronounced – especially for foreigners encountering them for the first time. It is also a part that published books are unable to replicate.

However, even more interestingly for me, a student of language in general, I began to be disturbed by the absence of a Yorùbá-Yorùbá dictionary anywhere at all. All the Yorùbá dictionaries I had seen or bought or used since I’d been interested in the subject were bilingual, such that one could call them translation dictionaries. They are good to have if the aim was for users to translate their thoughts into English or meant only for users who spoke English alone and merely wanted to know the meaning of a Yorùbá word they’d come across, but not for much else. This is not an exclusively Yorùbá problem, I should point out. Everywhere the word “Yorùbá” is used in this essay, one could easily replace it with “Igbo” or “Hausa” or “Fulfude” or “Esan” and it would still be relevant, sometimes even in a worse way for some of these languages.

And so, we have decided to expand into a more ambitious lexicography project: a fully multimedia dictionary of Yorùbá that is free, open, accessible, comprehensive, and – importantly – monolingual. What this means is that while the definition of the words will have English translations/interpretations present (I guess that makes it monolingual-bilingual dictionary), it won’t be its primary feature. Users will be able to use the dictionary to understand what Yorùbá words mean in a different language (English/French/German/etc), but its focus will be in defining words in Yorùbá for speakers (and learners) of the language. Thus, instead of a traditionally Yorùbá-English dictionary, this will be a Yorùbá-Yorùbá-English (where English can be expanded to French/German/Portuguese etc later). It will also be multimedia, with a chance to embed photographs, audios, and videos.

There are many reasons for this focus on Yorùbá-Yorùbá first. First, we have always believed that development comes from innovation and that innovation cannot happen when one cannot think properly in their mother tongue. So empowering a Nigerian language, starting with Yorùbá, for which we have a volunteer team on the ground, to properly cope with the 21st-century reality is the first step in this direction. Some state governments around Nigeria (like Lagos) are already empowering their educational sectors to use local languages as a medium of instruction. This is a good thing. Creating more tools that are universally available and accessible to everyone with an internet connection will complement these new efforts and empower speakers of these languages to better understand their language and innovate with it. Think of an Igbo dictionary with Igbo definitions. Same for Edo or Berom or Ibani. Having these tools available online will also help these languages better interact with technology – a problem that has plagued many African languages since the invention of the world wide web.

And so, let me introduce you to our new project at www.YorubaWord.com and www.OroYoruba.com.

This will be the first of its kind that is crowdsourced, multimedia, and free to use. The crowdsourcing element, just like for YorubaName.com, will ensure that users are also part of the data-gathering team and our first feedback mechanism. New words will be added by users searching for them as well as by the in-house lexicographers and our collaborative researchers. Along with the aid of other resources from published materials and archives from over many decades of scholarship, we hope that this becomes the primary place for learning about Yorùbá words. The element of English incorporated as a complementary feature will also help this work function as a translation dictionary for those who might need it.

As with our earlier projects, there will also be sister projects with other Nigerian languages as soon as we find volunteer lexicographers and other kinds of support to bring them to life. For this, we have also bought IgboWord.com, HausaWord.com, and a few others. Earlier this year, we got an $8000 endowment from a Nigerian couple towards the Yorùbá aspect of this effort, which is why it is the first language to take off. We are still seeking other collaborations.

Our work at YorubaName has always been an intervention in the cultural space as a way to open up an underrated industry of African language technology and empower cultural enthusiasts, developers, scholars, and others, to document local knowledge in technologically accessible formats and empower us to better fit in the modern age. This was why we created a text-to-speech project in November 2017 at www.ttsYoruba.com and to help to pronounce the names in the Names Dictionary. It is why we released a free tonemarking software for Igbo and Yorùbá, and it is also why we are currently working to create artificial speech recognition solutions for Nigerian languages. It is why we are supporting efforts to create IgboName.com as a sister site to YorubaName.com. It is why we will continue to explore opportunities, in business, civil society, education, technology, and others, to empower our languages and cultures, and help them thrive in this century and into the next.

We continue to rely on your support. You can continue to reach us at project@yorubaname.com or donate to the project using this paypal link.  Meanwhile, you can follow the new project at www.YorubaWord.com and at http://www.twitter.com/YorubaWord. New volunteers are welcome too.

in Language / Lexicography 3 comments
March 12, 2018  by

Yorùbá Tonemarking Workshop in Lagos

On Saturday, March 10, 2018, YorubaName held its first Yorùbá language tonemarking workshop at Capital Square in Lekki, Lagos. It was a four-hour interactive class designed to demystify the Yorùbá tone in reading, writing, listening, and speaking, and attendees were drawn from various sectors of society, from law to journalism to tech to economics. They each paid 5,000 naira to attend, although there were five free slots provided by the support we got from an anonymous donor as well as Capital Square, Lagos.

The idea to have such a class/workshop has been with us for a while, but it kicked into high gear this week when the suggestion on twitter was met with an overwhelmingly positive response. Tonemarking words/sentences in Yorùbá is one part of learning the language that most people have admitted having problems with. Yorùbá is a tone language, like Mandarin, Vietnamese, and a number of other world languages that use pitch variation to change the meaning of words. Famous examples in Yorùbá are the words ọkọ́ (hoe), ọkọ (husband), ọkọ̀ (vehicle), ọ̀kọ̀ (spear), which mean different things depending on the tone marks placed on the vowels.

Because of a declining interest in local language education in Nigeria, and the pervasive attitude among Nigerian elites that teaching and learning in English alone was desirable as a means to success, teaching Yorùbá (or Igbo, Hausa, and other Nigerian languages) had suffered, and nowhere more seriously with regards to Yorùbá than in the teaching of tonemarking, which is a cornerstone of the language. Even in natural language processing, overcoming the tone is always one of the first challenges to conquer before anything can be done (which explains our focus on, and work with, TTSYorùbá a few months ago).

When I was growing up in Ìbàdàn and reading literature in Yorùbá, it was never a normal thing to see a text written in the language without appropriate tone marks. Sure, people sometimes made mistakes in writing, but the default state of things whenever the language was presented in text paid respect to the work of scholars who had created a writing orthography. Occasionally in public, one came across signboards with poorly-written texts showing the writer wasn’t a Yorùbá-literate person, but official documents written in the language at least tried to comply with the writing rules. It seemed though, over the years, that an unwritten consensus was reached that formal rules be left to literatures-in-Yorùbá alone and spared from other platforms. So, over time, we started seeing more texts everywhere (in newspapers, signboards, movies, etc) which weren’t tonemarked at all, and subject to ambiguous interpretation.

This book, published in 1980, has hand-inserted tonemarking on the cover.

The result of this is a pernicious culture of nonchalance that eventually returned to consume the Yorùbá literary industry itself, but not before destroying African literature in general and messing up the work of the older generation of scholars who bequeathed the heritage in the first place. Today, not many books are published in the language. Those that are, needed a lot of resources to publish because software manufacturers haven’t created enough tools to write Yorùbá tones, so publishers are reluctant to make the effort to secure them. Eventually, the industry collapsed.  In the past, even when the relevant typefaces weren’t available to render tonemarked Yorùbá vowels, postproduction efforts were put in place to ensure that the books still properly rendered the language (see attached image). But over time, that willingness waned and took with it a chance for an industry to pressure technological corporations to create the tools needed for writing. It took the recent effort of our team, in 2015, by creating a free downloadable tonemarking software, to empower a new generation of writers intent on writing the language correctly.

But the problem doesn’t only affect the Yorùbá literary industry. As I’ve mentioned in previous places, sometimes while reviewing Nigerian literature in English, it is a shame to see a Yorùbá writer in English go to long lengths to cater to the writing systems of other languages whose words are used in his/her work but totally ignore it deals with Yorùbá.

I once asked Wọlé Ṣóyínká (Africa’s first Nobel Laureate) in person what, in his opinion, was the reason why writers-in-English of his generation didn’t care to properly tonemark Yorùbá words/names in their work. He didn’t have an answer. Instead, he asked me to read the preface to his latest play Alápatà Àpáta which, in truth, dealt with the subject in considerable detail, focusing on the playwright’s own angst at watching Yorùbá and non-Yorùbá actors mangle the pronunciation of simple Yorùbá names when they could pronounce even more complex European ones. But he never successfully defended why, over the years, none of his own earlier plays, published by the big and established publishers, had been consistent with the tone marking of character names and their lines. What I wanted to know was whether this was at the insistence of these publishers (many of which were led by either foreigners or Nigerians who were trained abroad) who wanted conformity with British standards or usually ignoring anything that didn’t feel English, or whether it was a result of nonchalance by the writers themselves, for not insisting (as some modern writers have – see Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, etc) that this be done.

A couple of weeks ago, the Lagos State Government passed a law making it compulsory to learn Yorùbá in its schools. It was a brave step in the right direction and a return to focus on local language education as an equally important part of child upbringing. But years of neglect has decimated the teacher population for this language, many of whom have switched to other subjects. So, now that a demand exists, we are taking it upon ourselves to help train new people in filling the gap.

But these series of classes aren’t directed as intending teachers alone. Individuals around the country, first-time learners of Yorùbá, expats living in Lagos and are interested in learning the skill, tech professionals and other types of professionals interested in the language, will all benefit. Our aim is to ensure that the skill of tonemarking is restored to its pride of place in the learning and speaking of Yorùbá. No one can claim to be a good writer/reader of the language without being able to successfully tell the difference between Adésọ́lá and Adéṣọlá. No longer should we have to read ambiguous road signs because the writer couldn’t go through the pains of learning to write properly in the target language. By providing training opportunities of this nature for willing participants across the state and beyond, we hope to rejuvenate the language, provide educational opportunities for willing learners, and restore writing and reading in Yorùbá to a good place in this society.

A second workshop has been planned for April 6, 2018. It will hold at (and is supported by) Civic Hive, Yaba, Lagos. This one is free and open to all and you can register here. With sponsorship and support, we might be able to make this a regular monthly workshop for all interested participants at an affordable price – or for free. An online class is also being planned going forward. (So, if you would like to support us, send an email to us at project@yorubaname.com). We are glad for this opportunity to help educate the public and revitalize a language, but more importantly, we are excited that an appetite exists for this kind of intervention.

in General / Language 2 comments
February 15, 2018  by

#MemeML: Language Diversity Has Never Been So Much Fun!

For the second year in a row, International Mother Language Day (Feb 21) is preceded by a week-long meme campaign that challenges commonly held expectations of minority languages.

Led by co-organizers Rising Voices, the Living Tongues Institute, First Peoples’ Cultural Council, Indigenous Tweets, Endangered Languages Project, and the Digital Language Diversity Project, the 2018 Meme Challenge brings together individual language advocates and organizations from around the world to highlight the cause of language diversity online, with a humorous twist. Last year’s edition led to the translation of the Meme Challenge website into 34 languages, including Yorùbá, and the creation of memes in languages like Asturian, Inuktitut and Bengali, to name just three.

As a collective that is deeply committed to supporting diverse language use online, the YorubaName team invites you to add your voice to this meme challenge. The only requirements are an Internet connection and a good sense of humor! You can find user-friendly meme templates on websites such as MemeGen and Memegenerator (need more tips? Head over here.)

This is a unique opportunity to collaborate on a global level and share your love of language with the world. The celebration will culminate on February 21st, with International Mother Language Day, a special day that recognizes the importance of each language and sheds light on speaker communities that are too often forgotten or denigrated in official discourse.

February 21st also marks Speak Yoruba Day! What started as a campaign to pressure Twitter into offering a Yoruba interface, has taken a life of its own and become a yearly social media event during which participants post in Yorùbá, share each other’s posts and generally delight in the Yorùbá language. No matter your language level or confidence in writing it, you are welcome to the party :). This year, we are also inviting people who speak every other Nigerian language to join in with their own language as well. The International Mother Tongue Day is set aside by UNESCO to help call attention to language diversity around the world.

Look out for #MemeML on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook and fill our timelines with all the beautiful languages you speak! See you on the web!

in Featured / General / Language 0 comments
December 15, 2017  by

Yorùbá Melody Audio Course

This morning, in collaboration with OrishaImage.com, we are glad to announce the release of a multilingual audio course, in English-Yorùbá, Spanish-Yorùbá, and Portuguese-Yorùbá. This is a project that has been a few months in the making, created for the benefit of speakers of each of these European languages interested in learning Yorùbá. Each audio is about 90 minutes mp3 of useful phrases in 22 chapters for Olórìshà and cultural tourists!

It is free but licensed under Creative Commons. This means that you are free to share the files with your friends and family or even on your own website, as long as you provide a link to orishaimage.com and yorubaname.com and follow the license rules: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0.

The audios can be downloaded to devices or streamed online directly.

The 22 chapters of this course are: Introduction/ Greetings/ Politeness/ Presenting Oneself/ Accommodation/ Compliments/ Question Words/ Appointments/ Time/ Climate/ On The Way/ Culture/ Orisha/ Market/ Relations/ Eating And Drinking/ Understanding/ Health/ Emergency/ General Expressions/ Yorùbá Names. Listen to it online or download it to your computer (90 MB size, mp3 file) by using one of the following three players.

Find them below.

English

Spanish

Portuguese

 

Read a conversation between Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún of YorubaName.com and Moussa Kone of OrishaImage.com about the project here.

in Audio/Sound / Language 0 comments
March 24, 2017  by

Of Names, Like Puzzles

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?

in General / Language / Lexicography 1 comments
February 4, 2017  by

Mother Language Day to Be Celebrated with Yorùbá Memes

Every year since 2014, 21st February has marked #TweetYorùbá day, an online campaign running concurrently with UNESCO’s International Mother Language Day, in which we flood our social media streams with posts in Yorùbá and bring attention to issues of language diversity online and offline.

This year, we start the fun early with a very exciting concept: an international meme campaign in languages such as Bambara, Swahili, Galo, Bininj Kunwok, Euskara, Pular and more, all under one hashtag: #MemeML.

Spanish meme “when you only speak one language…”

A fun way to celebrate linguistic diversity

Co-organized by Rising Voices and the Living Tongues Institute, First Peoples’ Cultural Council, Indigenous Tweets, Endangered Languages Project, First Languages Australia, and the Digital Language Diversity Project, the project is a fantastic opportunity to connect with other groups around the world who are working towards advancing their own languages, whether it be in the form of revitalisation efforts or a struggle for greater recognition in the public sphere. The official website’s introductory message has already been translated into 23 languages including Pular, Bambara and Afrikaans, and speakers of other languages are warmly invited to join in.

In previous editions of International Mother Language Day, online activities focused primarily on using Twitter as a way to promote endangered, minority, indigenous, and heritage languages. But this year is a bit different, as Eddie Avila, director of Rising Voices, explains:

We are hoping to make it a month-long activity culminating on February 21. We chose to try something different this year, and thought memes might be a fun and more creative way to encourage and celebrate linguistic diversity on the internet. 

With just 17 days to go, #MemeML needs all hands on deck to make this month-long event a true representation of language diversity and language activism online. Participants are already flooding in from all corners of the globe and together, we can make a point of adding our voices to showcase important aspects of Yorùbá culture as well as the need to preserve the language.

Add your creative voice!

At YorubaName, we were instantly taken with the idea and we’d love for Yorùbá memes to be a part of the global #MemeML. Here is how you can help:

1. Draw attention to Meme ML by sharing social media posts and inviting others to participate.

2. Create a meme and share it on all your social media platforms with the hashtags: #MemeML and #Yorùbá or #Yoruba. Feel free to tag all your friends as well, since fun is known to be contagious! You can also share your creations on this Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/mememl

3. Translate this page into Yorùbá and send your translation to project@yorubaname.com

in Featured / Language 0 comments
December 16, 2016  by

“Èṣù” isn’t “the Devil”; But You Knew That Already

Since readers of this blog have been fascinated with the last two posts on the etymology of common Yorùbá root morphemes, we might as well tackle the big and most controversial one: Èṣù.

Born into old Yorùbá mythology, lionized in the various Odù Ifá as a trickster god of some sort, servant to many of the other dominant gods, Èṣù enjoyed his run as a clown and Falstaff known for his mischief as well as an amorphous personality determined by situation, master, or purpose. He was not a harmless fellow, to be clear, but his character was usually determined by a lot more things than “good/evil” or “death/life” or “heaven/hell”. Then came Christianity.

I haven’t read enough about Nigeria’s pre-colonial missionary days to know the process by which certain expressions were agreed upon as representing specific ideas in the new Christian religion. (Please feel free to suggest in the comment below which books I should read for this purpose). But we know that when Bishop Àjàyí Crowther and his team decided on rendering the famous Biblical character known as Satan or Devil into Yorùbá, they settled on Èṣù, the Yorùbá trickster god. With the benefit of hindsight, the choice made some sense. To the new converts hoping to leave behind a culture in which one god wielded a lot of power to make or mar relationships depending on who was paying the bills or – as I’ll illustrate below – on the innate character of the people un/fortunate enough to interact with him, this was the perfect fall guy (or “fall god”, if we’re being technical). The Yorùbá had no conceptualization of heaven or hell as Christians did, so had no “devil” or “hell”. But since the bible needed translation and the missionary journey needed its fervent converts, Èṣù took the fall and acquired a new role.

I was once asked on Facebook, by the author Yẹ́misí Aríbisálà, the following question: ‘Why do the Yoruba say “Èṣù má ṣe mí, ọmọ ẹlòmíi ni o ṣe” when he is such a harmless just-slightly mischievous fellow, so useful at helping us understand the contradictions of our lives?’ Here was my response, in full:

There is a famous story of Èṣù in his most mischievous element, one day walking on the street and (perhaps bored) deciding to confound two friends who had displayed what he considered an irritating level of public affection for each other. What he did was to wear an outfit that had two different colours on each side, one part red and the other black. But the colours were split such that each was on two sides of his body – the red on the right and the black on the left. For some reason, the friends didn’t see him until he walked right between them, so each only saw one colour. But as soon as he had gone and disappeared, they began to argue between each other about what colour the stranger wore. One said “red” while the other said “black”, and the argument degenerated. Needless to say, that was the end of the “friendship”. What’s the lesson here? I don’t know. Perhaps, that you never really know how friendly you are with one person until you’ve had a disagreement, or that if you let a difference in perspectives change who you are, then you were never close in the first place. What I took away, referring to your question, is that the Yorùbá often wish never to be subjected to such test, not because it is always harmful, but because it can sometimes have unintended consequences. But as far as Èṣù is concerned, he’s just providing just one more way to test what we’ve agreed upon as conventional truth.

Anyway, since the Holy Bible became our primary source of interpreting this new foreign idea, the language adapted to it, with everything evil becoming associated with “Èṣù”. If you didn’t go to church, or did things that the church frowned upon, you were “ọmọ Èṣù”. It was probably also helpful that it contrasted easily with “ọmọ Jésù” which is the good child, son of Jesus”. Jésù, the saviour, was on one side, and Èṣù, the devil, the accursed one, was on the other. Eventually, all those previously named with Èṣù began to change their names. If the psychological bullying of the Pentecostal movement didn’t get you, your mates in school, who came from Christian homes and knew of Èṣù only in that one context of the church, would ensure that you make required changes.

Names like Èṣùbíyìí (Èṣù gave birth to this) or Ẹṣùgbadé (Èṣù received royalty) slowly disappeared from use, to be found only in literature and television. Even in the case of the latter, children were warned off too much familiarity with such forms of entertainment with the worry that one might get tainted by that contagious evil. Others just changed them to Olúbíyìí or Olúgbadé. See previous post on Olú.

But there was a slight break. Crowther and his other translators, for some reason, decide to translate “Deliver us from evil” as “Gbà wá lọ́wọ́ bìlísì”. Bìlísì was a Yorùbá corruption of Iblis, which is the Arabic word for evil and had also entered the Yorùbá vocabulary due to Hausa/Arabic influence from the north. That was fine. But why wasn’t it used in all all the other cases where “Devil” or “Satan” needed translation help? “Satan” sometimes was translated as “Sàtánì”, which was good, but in popular usage Èṣù became more famous than them all.

In October 2015, before I started working at Google, I was tagged by Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina on Facebook about someone who wanted to know why Google Translate had “Devil” and “Satan” translated as “Èṣù” when they were not the same thing. I answered that it was probably the fault of earlier translators of the bible where Google engineers likely got their data. I began working at Google later that year but totally forgot about the tag.

Then sometime in January 2016, something else brought the issue to my attention. I was now an employee of the company and now ostensibly in a position to make a change. The idea that generations of Yorùbá children/readers and non-speakers would grow up getting a wrong impression if all they had was Google Translate to learn from felt very disturbing. Technology was replacing books anyway, and we needed it to better represent the culture.

At the time, however, I had no idea that I could do anything about it. My role in at Google was on a totally different project. Google Translate is manned, contrary to what people outside think, not by linguists but by engineers. And I didn’t know that I could convince these guys who worked many miles and time zones away to pay attention to something seemingly mild, and with agreed-upon roots in the foundation of Yorùbá literacy. But it turned out that I could, and I did.

For ideas, I crowdsourced an open conversation on my Facebook page about prospects of each new translation suggestion. And a week later, the translate engine had begun to reflect a more acceptable approximation of evil/devil/Satan in Yorùbá to users of that Google service. I made a tongue-in-cheek post to that effect on January 16th: “Early this morning in Mountain View California,” it read, “the trickster Èsù was relieved of its perceived demonic duties.”

Èṣù now translates as Èṣù, devil as Bìlísì, and Satan as Sàtánì, and Demon as ànjọ̀nú (also with an arabic Etymology). Only fair. The tone marking on the translations were the cherry on top. I wish all the Yorùbá words in the machine had tone marks, but that would mean replacing the engineers behind Google Translate with actual linguists. A long shot.

Now this probably would not change the public perception of what had taken generations to ingrain, but one hopes that it might begin a new way of restoring the true role of what was just another character in the Yorùbá religious pantheon in the public consciousness. At least one way of being true to the word’s cultural and linguistic history.

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Postscript

A year or so after I left Google, people started pointing out to me that the translations had reverted to Devil, Demon, and Satan for Èṣù. Being out of the system, I couldn’t do anything about it. I returned to Google in February of 2019 as NLP Linguist for African Languages, and the original changes are back, hopefully for good this time.

in General / Language / Lexicography 8 comments
December 12, 2016  by

“Ọlá” Isn’t (Always) “Wealth”

One common stereotype about Yorùbá names is that they, on the surface, always seem obsessed with wealth. It is incompatible with the truth, of course, but examples are usually provided easily to show how almost any verb combined with the word for “wealth” will almost generate a Yorùbá name.

My name is “Kọ́lá” (full name Kọ́láwọlé), a very good example of this instance.

There are others: Bọ́lá, Ṣọlá, Tọ́lá, Nọ́lá, Fọlá, Dọlá, Gbọlá, etc. In actual fact, I realised a while ago that a simple computer program can generate unlimited numbers of valid Yorùbá names if we would just combine almost any consonant in the language with a few key root morphemes (like ọlá, adé, oyè, etc).

The problem, however, is that the “ọlá” in Yorùbá names do not all mean the same thing. They are not, to use a cliché, created equal. In the case of “Kọ́láwọlé”, I can provide a curt interpretation as “(He who) bring(s) wealth into the house” but that doesn’t say all that the name embodies. In any case, the “ọlá” in the name is more than nominal wealth. It is prominence, it is dignity, it is nobility, it is success, it is honour, it is acclaim.

A man referred to as “Ọlọ́lá” is not just rich, he is a notable public figure with admirable nobility. If money were to be the distinguishing factor, he would be called “Olówó” instead. There is another appellation given to properly highlight material wealth. That is Ọlọ́là. This ọlà (note the difference in the tonal marking) highlights material success above individual character or nobility.

Therefore a name like Adégbọlá would be better interpreted either as  “We have arrived to receive wealth” or “The crown/royalty has received nobility/prominence/honour/success.” The context, or the family story, will decide which one is appropriate in each instance. A name like Ọláńrewájú, however, brings a different problem. Same with Ọláwálé. Here, the root “ọlá” is being given a subject role in which it is forced to be more than wealth or nobility. It becomes a person! A Dictionary of Yorùbá Personal Names by Adébóyè Babalọlá and Olúgbóyèga Àlàbá defines both, respectively, as “The head of this noble family is progressing” and “The new member of our noble family has come home.” In both cases, Ọlá is a living being, represented by this newly-born child.

Please leave other relevant examples that you’re familiar with in the comment below.

In other instances, Ọlá means “blessing” or “grace”. And isn’t that interesting? The sentence “Ọlá Ọlọ́run ni mo jẹ” means “I’ve benefited from the grace of God.” In this case, it is not “wealth” or “nobility” at all. What the name is saying is that if not for the presence/grace/help of God, the child wouldn’t have been born. Now, this doesn’t mean that it couldn’t also mean “the wealth of God”, but that would be a simplistic reading indeed. This interpretation would explain names like Ọláìyá (“the benefit/grace of mother”), Ọláòkun (“the benefit of the ocean – or foreign travel”) or Ọláolúwa (born by “the grace/benefit of God”). See also: Ọláifá, Ọláọ̀pá, Ọláoyè.

Photo from PixarBay

In late 2015, an expectant inter-ethnic couple (the wife is Yorùbá while the husband is Igbo) wrote to us asking for help in picking out a name for their firstborn child (you can read the whole blog post here). They were open to anything, especially names that could be easily pronounced by both parents. But they had a caveat: the name shouldn’t have “ọlá” in it. Why? Because it connoted “wealth” and they wanted names that focused instead on celebrating the child than something that would seem so superficial and focused on material gains. They eventually settled for “Tiwanìfẹ́” (Ours is love/loving) which is a beautiful name. But had they settled for “Tiwalọlá” (ours is grace/nobility/wealth), it would also have been equally as delightful. In any case, the “wealth” or “nobility” in Tiwalọlá refers to the child and nothing else: “this wealth, this child, is ours”.

Perhaps it is what is lost in translation. When we say “wealth” in Yorùbá, we are not always referring to money or material wealth (that would be ọlà). That “wealth” referred in “ọlá” is something more: human potential, largeness of heart, generosity of spirit (and of materials, yes), nobility, dignity, honour, and grace, depending on context. In names like “Ìwàlọlá” or “Ọmolọlá”, the definition of “ọlá” is actually given, as “character”  and “child” respectively. And in “Babalọlá”, “Father/hood is honour/wealth/nobility.”

That is why what a child like “Kọ́lá” brings into the house in “Kọ́láwọlé” is more than just a temporary (or even measurable) treasure.

in Language / Lexicography 4 comments
July 20, 2016  by

The Making of an Entry: from Submission to Publication

As at this writing, there are 3,629 published name entries in the dictionary.

Screenshot (85)At the rate of about twenty new entries per day, we could reach a year’s goal of 10,000 entries in no time. In this post, I would like to show you how a submission from the homepage becomes an indexed entry in the dictionary. There will be lots of pictures to illustrate the process.

The homepage is at YorubaName.com where hundreds of users have submitted their names into the dictionary since we launched the public page in February 2016.

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So, what happens when an entry is submitted?

On the lexicography dashboard, I see a list of names suggested by the public, or by other in-house lexicographers. As you can see in the image below, the email of the submitter is listed.

Screenshot (62)I have blurred an email address to protect the person’s privacy. In the future, we will have a login name instead of an email address.

To begin editing, I click on whatever name I would like to work on. In this case, I give preference to the publicly submitted name over the in-house ones. The name is “oderinde“.

In the edit mode, the name is expanded and I can see all that the submitter put in his/her submission. In most cases, as in this example, the submitter hasn’t been able to find the exact spelling of the name so some editing will be needed.Screenshot (63)

I begin first with capitalisation. I change the first letter from “o” to “Ọ”

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The submitter seems to have an idea of the meaning so I move further down to the syllable breakdown. This functionality is meant to be used to train our text-to-speech system to know how to render Yorùbá names. The functionality isn’t yet live, but the field is compulsory, so I complete it, rendering the name syllable by syllable.

Screenshot (66)By now, I’ve completed the three required fields. So, to prevent my work from being lost, I scroll down and save the entry.

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I get a notification on the top right corner.

Screenshot (68)Sometimes I return to the “meaning” box to modify what the submitter wrote.

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Then I move to the “morphology” field to break down the name according to its smallest meaningful units (the linguistic term is morpheme). This is usually the most exciting part for me, because that is where the names usually unravel.

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The morphology and the gloss fields are usually written in small letters, but their meanings can include capital letters in the case of proper nouns.

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Sometimes there is more than one meaning of a morpheme, so I supply them, and then save.

Screenshot (72)I save at this stage by just hitting “enter”.

The geolocation field is one of our most cherished features, designed to be able to map certain names across the country. The user has chosen “Abẹ́òkuta” as the location of this name. But because I know that it is a name that is borne in other different parts of Yorùbáland, I add another location indicator: “General”.

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At this point, I get an epiphany as to a better way to express the meaning of this name that is not too literal as to render it risible.

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So I edit it again. This time I’m satisfied.

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Finally, to see if there are notable people with this name, I turn to Google, which never fails.

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I get many hits, but I am biased to the topmost one.

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I sometimes also go to the “news” tab, since notability might also reflect in the newsmaking ability of the bearer.

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In the end, I settle for the topmost hit on Google. For now, at least, until another user goes to the entry and upbraids us for overlooking another famous name.

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I add the link as well.

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Then save.

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Finally, I publish the entry.

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Ọdẹ́rìndé is now in our dictionary!

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The end.

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Addendum

Shortly after this post was drafted for review, Laila drew my attention to an interesting phonological feature in this particular name which I’d not paid attention to in my earlier work: there is an extra /ẹ/ in “Ọdẹ́rìndé” which I hadn’t accounted for before. As it often happens with incomplete entries, I simply returned to the name and edited as necessary.

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I also left a short note in the relevant box about the phonological behaviour of certain tones like this in contiguous environment. In a layman’s language, a grammatical morpheme in this word took on the feature of a neighbouring vowel resulting in an extra tone mark where there otherwise isn’t any.

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Fascinating linguist’s stuff.

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If you’d like to join our lexicography department to help speed up the meeting of our 10,000 names goal, send an email to project@yorubaname.com with “Lexicographer Volunteer” in the subject field.

in Language / Lexicography 0 comments