“An advice,” “a good news”: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
Farooq A. Kperogi
By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
Many people called my attention to a tweet by Abike Dabiri-Erewa, President Muhammadu Buhari’s Senior Special Assistant on Foreign Affairs and Diaspora, who wrote that her travel warning to Nigerians to not travel to the US was just “an advice.”
That is, of course, grammatically incorrect. “Advice” is a non-count noun, which does not admit of the conventional singular and plural forms of regular nouns. In other words, there is neither “advices” nor “an advice.” The singular form of “advice” is expressed as “a piece of advice” (or just “advice”) and the plural form is expressed as “pieces of advice.”
Dabiri-Erewa, who is incidentally a graduate of English from the Obafemi Awolowo University, is not alone in the practice of unconventionally singularizing and pluralizing uncountable nouns.
In an April 14, 2010 article titled “Common Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English,” I pointed out that, “One notable feature of Nigerian English is the predilection for adding plural forms to nouns that don’t normally admit of them in Standard English. This is certainly a consequence of the inability of many Nigerian speakers and writers of the English language to keep up with the quirky, illogical irregularities that are so annoyingly typical of the conventions of English grammar.”
How English Plurals Are Formed
It’s common knowledge that the plural form of most nouns in English is created by adding the letter “s” to the end of nouns. But sometimes it requires adding “es” to nouns that end in “ch,” “x,” “s,” or s-like sounds, such as “inches,” “axes,” “lashes,” etc. There are also, of course, irregular forms like “children” as the plural of “child,” “oxen as the plural of “ox,” etc.
Then you have uncountable—or, if you will, “non-count”— nouns, which cannot be modified or combined with the indefinite articles “a” or “an.” This is precisely where Nigerians fall foul of standard usage norms.
Irregular noun plurals
Most educated Nigerians generally know that nouns like equipment, furniture, information (except in the expression “criminal informations,” or “an information,” which is used in the US and Canada to mean formal accusation of a crime, akin to indictments), advice, news, luggage, baggage, faithful (i.e., loyal and steadfast following, as in, “millions of Christian and Muslim faithful”), offspring, personnel, etc. remain unchanged even when they are expressed in a plural sense. But few know of many other nouns that have this characteristic.
Unconventional noun singularizations in Nigerian English
Although most educated Nigerians would never say “newses” or “advices” or “informations” to express the plural forms of these nouns, they tend to burden the words with singular forms that are not grammatical. For instance, they would say something like “that’s a good news” or “it’s just an advice” or “it’s an information for you.”
Well, since these nouns don’t have a plural form, they also can’t have a singular variant, that is, they cannot be combined with the definite articles “a” or “an.” So the correct way to render the sentences above would be “that’s a good piece of news” (or simply “that’s good news”), “it’s just a piece of advice” (or “it’s just advice), and “it’s information for you.”
Other nouns that are habitually pluralized wrongly in Nigerian English are:
“Legislations.” Nigerians inflect the word “legislation” for grammatical number by adding “s” to it. The sense of the word that denotes “law” (such as was used in this Punch headline: “Nigerians need legislations that will ease their problems –Cleric”) does not take an “s” even if it’s used in the plural sense. In Standard English, the word’s plural form is usually expressed with the phrase “pieces of,” or such other “measure word” (as grammarians call such expressions).
So the headline should correctly read: “Nigerians need pieces of legislation…” or simply “Nigerians need legislation….” However, the sense of the word that means “the act of making laws” may admit of an “s,” although it’s rare to encounter the world “legislations” in educated speech in Britain or America.
“Rubbles.” Another noun that Nigerians commonly add “s” to in error is “rubble,” that is, the remains of something that has been destroyed or broken up. This word is never inflected for plural. It’s customary to indicate its plural form with the measure word “piles of,” as in, “piles of rubble.” (Grammarians call words that are invariably singular in form “singulare tantum”).
“Vermins.” Similarly, the word “vermin,” which means pests (e.g. cockroaches or rats) — or an irritating or obnoxious person— is invariably singular and therefore does not require an “s” or the indefinite article “a.” But in Nigerian English it’s common to encounter sentences like “they are vermins” or “he is a vermin.”
“Footages/aircrafts.” “Footage” and “aircraft” are also invariably singular. So it’s nonstandard to either say or write, as many Nigerian do, “a footage” or “footages,” “an aircraft” or “aircrafts.” Dispense with the “s” at the end of the nouns and the indefinite articles “a” and “an” at the beginning.
“Heydays.” There is nothing like “heydays” in Standard English. It remains “heyday” even if the sense of the word is plural.
“Yesteryears.” Yesteryear is also invariably singular and does not change form when it expresses a plural sense. Only Nigerian English speakers and perhaps other non-native English speakers pluralize “yesteryear.”
“Cutleries.” Cutlery always remains “cutlery” even if you’re talking of millions of eating utensils.
“An overkill.” In Standard English, “overkill” is usually uninflected for number. So, where Nigerian English speakers would say “it’s an overkill,” people who speak standard varieties of English simply say “it’s overkill.”
“Slangs.” Nigerian English speakers habitually pluralize slang as “slangs” and singularize it as “a slang.” That’s unconventional. The Standard English plural forms of “slang” can be just “slang” (as in, “he speaks a lot of slang”) or “slang words,” or “slang terms,” or “slang expressions.” The singular form is simply “slang” (as in, “that was slang”).
“Invectives.” The word’s plural form is expressed by saying “a stream of invective,” not “invectives.”
“Beehive of activities.” The expression “beehive of activities,” which is common in Nigerian English, is nonstandard. It is usually rendered as “a beehive of activity” (also “a hive of activity). Its plural form is “beehives of activity” (or “hives of activity”). When “activity” means a “situation in which something is happening or a lot of things are being done,” it is usually uncountable.
So, it should be “a lot of economic activity,” not “a lot of economic activities.” It should be “physical activity,” not “physical activities.”
The only sense of “activity” that is pluralized is the sense that means “a thing that you do for interest or pleasure, or in order to achieve a particular aim,” such as “outdoor activities,” “leisure activities,” “criminal activities,” etc.
“Potentials.” It is usual in Nigerian English, even educated Nigerian English, to pluralize “potential” as “potentials,” particularly in the expression “Nigeria has great potentials.” In Standard English, however, “potential” is often uninflected for number, that is, it remains “potential” even if its sense is plural.
Why Native Speakers Don’t Pluralize These Nouns
As I’ve observed and chewed over these admittedly vexatious English plural forms over the years, I have been struck by the fact that I’ve never encountered any native speaker of the English language who has flouted these rules in speech or in writing. Not even my American college students who can be lax and slipshod with their grammar.
I think this is a consequence of the force of example. When people grow up not hearing older people say “an advice,” “a good news,” “legislations,” “vermins,” etc., they unconsciously internalize and make peace with the illogical irregularities that these exceptions truly are.
Related Articles:
School of Communication & Media
Kennesaw State University
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
Cornelius Hamelberg
Corrected:
Another link from my last posting that got lost in transition : Besserwisser
I'm impressed by the very correct English spoken by the Democratic Republic of the Congo's Moïse Katumbi .The British English besserwisser grammarians who genuflect in the direction of their qibla which is Buckingham Palace, can judge for themselves this his spoken performance . I for one understood him perfectly and his performance, in my view, was flawless. I wish that I could speak Mandarin Chinese or French or Lingala or Nigerian English at something like that level.
I don't suppose that the kinds of people who subscribe to the USA-Africa Forum are in need of these kind of language columns, but of course, the English Language scholar could have chosen to be doing it as a do-good social service , a kind of Pied Piper to his English language disciples
It would be far too tedious and almost meaningless to take it item by item, but just this one on advice should suffice. As for the other one, you kick his ass and he says, "I don't understand"
According to The Devil's Dictionary : Advice
"Many people " called his attention (Professor Farooq Kperogi's) to the tweet by Abike Daiquiri-Erewa. To be as precise as he would like everybody to be when observing the changing rules and regulations and laws of strangulation drafted by Her Majesty's Language still undergoing evolution, I should like to ask, " Exactly how many people, drew his attention to what in my personal opinion was an al- right tweet or telegram either as an official or an unofficial communiqué (and I would be prepared to put my head under the guillotine for it) :
I have always assumed that the language employed by the various ministries of foreign affairs the world over is aimed at communicating with fellow citizens and diverse members of the international community and that just like the newsreaders in English in several countries that do not have English as the mother tongue, concessions are made to local accents, language usage, in fact often to accents approximating the national English accent. So in Radio Sweden this is what you hear.
However, strictly speaking, when it comes to grammar or the precise meanings embedded in legalese , foreign ministries had better be extra careful ! The example that comes to mind immediately is UN Resolution 242 which up to today is still experiencing all kinds of twists and arrows of outrageous fortune, all based on differences in opinions about the meaning/s of "occupied territories" and "the occupied territories". Ultimately, the judges as to the implications of the legal meanings are international jurists who insist that the differences cannot be merely local, partisan understandings or interpretations of the English Language as used in international documents / agreements.
In the case under Prof Kperogi's magnifying glass, first and foremost everybody understands the advice that's being given.
Hopefully, the creative writers, poets, dramatists, songsters, will regularise some of what the language police and Her Majesty’s "Linguistic sanitary inspector" believe to be highly irregular as used by members of the Naija English Club - the latter a phrase that I got from cousin Kayode Robbin-Coker, himself an HMS ( in Her Majesty's Service) "language sanitary inspector " and a former inspector of schools. (I was infinitely more familiar with our elder, Adeneka Lincoln Robbin-Coker, in his day, a diamond miner...)
This too is cultural :
Rogie: Advice to Schoolgirls
Olayinka Agbetuyi
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Assensoh, Akwasi B.
Dear Brothers & Sisters:
The "Errors of Pluralization" debate did remind me of my old Nigerian mentor: In the mid-1960s, my old and legendary mentor, Baba Ijebu ("Ajebu") used to share with me some of the intellectual arguments among Nigerian scholars published in such Nigerian newspapers as DAILY TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES, LAGOS WEEKEND, TRIBUNE, SKETCH, etc. He would end by telling me: "The problems we have in Nigeria keep on multiplying because of people with book long qualifications."
Baba Ijebu often added his amazement that when he was in school, coming home with "D" grade on any class assignment was unacceptable. He exclaimed often about the fact that, in our day, important academic and professional degrees were riddled with "D", icluding: DDS; Ph.D.; DSC; MD; EDD; OD or DO; etc.
Baba Ijebu would have looked at the argument(s) and said: "Baba Ghana, na good grammar we dey chop?" He would, instead, praise the good looks of our sister (Abike Dabiri-Erewa), and probsbly add: "Be satisfied with whatever she says!" I echo that; also, I suggest that in West Africa, we should start identifying or thinking about having African Languages as the lingua franca for our various nations; we can learn from East Africa, where Ki-Swahili plays a major role. In that way, the pro-Queen's English debate among West African intellectuals may cease! Abi?
A.B. Assensoh.
Sent: Sunday, March 12, 2017 7:40 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: “An advice,” “a good news”: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
Kenneth Harrow
“(I know that the typical ivory tower grammarian looks down on the communicative success of the ' drop outs ' but the world outside the ivory towers is the litmus test of reality and prescriptive grammars versus the continual evolution of language.”
Upon what is this claim based? Do you know what is taught at American universities, ola?
Or are you imagining it?
Do you know how many classes or seminars are offered in hip hop or rap? How many dissertations now are based on it?
Ken harrow
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
Farooq A. Kperogi
School of Communication & Media
Kennesaw State University
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
Cornelius Hamelberg
Cornelius Hamelberg
We have discussed "faithfuls" before
N.B. One does not need to invoke anything like "poetic license" to say "Beehive of activities"
In my opinion and in the opinion of some other native speakers it's absolutely kosher but maybe not halal for the Nigerian masses.
Hopefully, we don't have to argue about potentials...
Good song : Englishman in New York
On Sunday, 12 March 2017 18:31:03 UTC+1, Farooq A. Kperogi wrote:
Farooq A. Kperogi
School of Communication & Media
Kennesaw State University
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
Maybe, because I reminise a lot I say Yesteryears although I am absolutely a native speaker and absolutely correct every time I say YESTERYEARS. I visited Izzy Young today, he reminisced a lot about New York etc about two hours, and I reminisced a lot about the Stockholm of yesteryears...
Cornelius Hamelberg
On Monday, 13 March 2017 22:20:55 UTC+1, Farooq A. Kperogi wrote:
Being a "native English speaker" isn't the same thing as being a speaker of Standard English. They are different. Many native speakers don't speak Standard English; they speak their regional varieties. With education, they learn Standard English. There is, strictly speaking, no native speaker of Standard English.It's a consciously learned variety of English, although it is true that it is made up of parts from different native regional varieties."Yesteryears" is demonstrably solecistic in Standard English. I don't know the regional native English variety you speak that countenances "yesteryears." My own research tells me "yesteryears" is used mostly by non-native English speakers. Standard English speakers say "days of yesteryear" to pluralize "yesteryear." In fact, all the regional native varieties I am familiar with never say "yesteryears."Farooq
Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.Associate ProfessorJournalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & MediaSocial Science BuildingRoom 5092 MD 2207402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State UniversityKennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.comTwitter: @farooqkperogAuthor of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
On Mon, Mar 13, 2017 at 2:52 PM, Cornelius Hamelberg <cornelius...@gmail.com> wrote:
Maybe, because I reminise a lot I say Yesteryears although I am absolutely a native speaker and absolutely correct every time I say YESTERYEARS. I visited Izzy Young today, he reminisced a lot about New York etc about two hours, and I reminisced a lot about the Stockholm of yesteryears...
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
Cornelius Hamelberg
I have also been reading continuously since I was six years old. I think that Patrick White is a great novelist. My wife is a native speaker of "standard Swedish" from which she sometimes translates ( also speaks Spanish, French, Italian, and of course English and is very much a grammarian...
On Monday, 13 March 2017 22:20:55 UTC+1, Farooq A. Kperogi wrote:
Being a "native English speaker" isn't the same thing as being a speaker of Standard English. They are different. Many native speakers don't speak Standard English; they speak their regional varieties. With education, they learn Standard English. There is, strictly speaking, no native speaker of Standard English.It's a consciously learned variety of English, although it is true that it is made up of parts from different native regional varieties."Yesteryears" is demonstrably solecistic in Standard English. I don't know the regional native English variety you speak that countenances "yesteryears." My own research tells me "yesteryears" is used mostly by non-native English speakers. Standard English speakers say "days of yesteryear" to pluralize "yesteryear." In fact, all the regional native varieties I am familiar with never say "yesteryears."Farooq
Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.Associate ProfessorJournalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & MediaSocial Science BuildingRoom 5092 MD 2207402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State UniversityKennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.comTwitter: @farooqkperogAuthor of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
On Mon, Mar 13, 2017 at 2:52 PM, Cornelius Hamelberg <cornelius...@gmail.com> wrote:
Maybe, because I reminise a lot I say Yesteryears although I am absolutely a native speaker and absolutely correct every time I say YESTERYEARS. I visited Izzy Young today, he reminisced a lot about New York etc about two hours, and I reminisced a lot about the Stockholm of yesteryears...
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
Farooq A. Kperogi
School of Communication & Media
Kennesaw State University
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
Kenneth Harrow
I certainly do not want to get in the middle of this, so consider my remarks on the side, and not trying to take sides.
I learned English by hearing it spoken,-- by my parents, and people around me.
I learned to say, it’s me, if someone said, who’s there
I learned to say, he knows more than me.
And many more constructions, that happen to be wrong. It was very difficult for me to learn, in high school and more likely in college, that these ways of speaking were incorrect since they felt completely right. After all, my parents spoke that way, and so did everyone else.
Now when I answer the phone I say, it’s I, not it’s me. I say, he knows more than I. I practically cannot say it otherwise since I corrected my students for making those errors for 50 years. You can say my spoken English is now deformed by the training to use correct, but not idiomatically normal speech in my pedagogy.
I think the answer to the question who is a “native speaker” is one who learns a language by speaking it, whether it is the first or nth language. What we learn in school is correct, but not necessarily normally spoken. And that’s the French I learned, and which at times makes it harder for me to understand the spoken language.
I’ll give an example of weirdness in this. when I moved to Michigan I learned that the store we shopped in for groceries was called meijer’s. that’s what everyone here called it. But the sign on the store is Meijer. I recently learned that Michigan is the only place in the country where the norm is to add ‘s to company names. It dates back, apparently, to when Ford opened a factory here, and people called it Ford’s. since then other establishments came to be assigned the possessive, for no good reason. Now outsiders who move to Michigan, and don’t have that pattern in their speech, say Meijer, where others like me, who learned to say it differently, continue with the inherited misuse.
Language usage is truly weird, and very fascinating.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
Cornelius Hamelberg
"A hotbed of intrigue/ intrigues"
Indeed, familiarity does breed contempt. And indeed just as this year's Polar Prize winner Sting sang some time ago,
"If "Manners maketh man" as someone said
Then
he's the hero of the day
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and
smile
Be yourself no matter what they say"
(Englishman
in New York)
Whose permission do I need to be or not to be, to think or not to think, to dream or not to dream the impossible dream in your beloved universal or Buckingham palace "standard English"? And exactly what is it? Is that what you speak? Is that what Sheikh Speare wrote or spoke ? Apart from a few gross grammatical errors in that little colloquial BBC blip, you sound like my friend who has never been overseas and is still rooted in Kumasi. You want to teach me English?
Pathetic.
Methinks that thou shouldst better stick to thine own comfort zone :
"Nigerian English" where you actually feel most at home.
I did not, nor do I need to proclaim my "native speakerness". I mentioned it just this once and in this discussion that you instigated. I know that you are distraught at the very thought that you are not and therefore cannot boast of the so called "native speakerness". Sorry about that. My honest opinion is that if it's your ambition to make standard English speakers out of Nigerians, you had better start with yourself. Then you could be a role model.
In my case, and ever so accidentally, it's a natural part of me, it's my language, it's what I do when I open my mouth and when somebody impolitely tells me to shut up, even when I close it, it's the language of the thoughts that run around in my head - as natural as Hausa or whatever it is that you speak and that is natural to you. There are over a hundred million such speakers. It’s nothing special - it's as special as a billion Chinese who speak Chinese - they don't have to quote Wole Soyinka about "Tigritude" pouncing, nor do I in order to demonstrate by formally/informally kicking somebody's ass in the lingo which you respect so much or want to glorify or sing hallelujah about. I don't.
It's just the colonial complex that is so feverishly at work in you, bristling at the whiskers
and at the pubic hairs going up those public stairs
sometimes I feel word-drunk like Eliot
"If you remember me, my Lord, at your prayers,
I'll remember you at kissing-time below the stairs".
And just who made Farooq Kperogi an expert on "Standard English"? You're not British or English or Scottish or Irish or Welsh, at least you don't sound like one. You don't want to become a living caricature or the butt end of cruel jokes about Her Majesty the Queen's " Standard English "do you? That Nigerian or first generation Baga-Nigerian American guy who wants to set himself up as an authority over the English speaking Empire? In that case I could take apart / disembowel your little blip on the BBC or anything that you write/ have written, formally/ informally. Trust me. ( I have looked at the diction in chapter one of Chigozie Obioma's "The Fishermen" a fantastic tragedy - why he chooses one word and not the other that's more conveniently at hand (about ten examples) but what purpose other than futility would it serve to write a fulsome article/ essay on that and forward it to some relevant outlet for such thoughts?)
Farooq, I'm going to be short here - by which I don't mean that I'm going to be impolite or rude to you. I just woke up of from a dream in which I was in Cochin and speaking English. I just told my Better Half about it. I should have written the details down. Shalom, my Sephardic friend - I think he was a Kabbalist, could remember and narrate in great detail dreams he had decades ago. How? I asked him, the second to last time I met him in this life. Just grab any detail of the dream that you remember - hold on to it, grasp it, meditate on it, try to remember and like a thread it should lead you back to the beginning of the dream and voilà with a little concentrated effort you achieve total recall. That's what he told me. Total recall of a long story that - as dreams go - probably only lasted a few seconds - or like the Prophet of Islam's miraj - a billionth of a second! The second thing I noticed (I won't tell you the first) was that most of the dreams he told me sounded like didactic stories (sort of) . I understand that one of the factors contributing to the dream I had this morning was reading Vik Bahl's posting The World Wildlife Fund, Trophy Hunters and Donald Trump Jr. and at the time and exactly just now, and from my yesteryears, from way back in 1977 in India, my own fond memory of Ganesh, the elephant at Shree Gurudev ashram at Gansehpuri at the time known as Shree Gurudev Siddha Peeth which is 47 miles away from Mumbai - in those days (yesteryears) known as Bombay, which is in Maharashtra state, where they speak the Marathi language, but Baba communicated with us in Hindi which was translated into English by Malti, now known as Gurumayi Chidvilasananda. There's a picture of Diana Ross riding that elephant - in Time magazine - when she visited at exactly the same time I was there. Apart from its fabled memory one more thing that we should know about the elephant - not just in Sanskrit lore, is its immense sense of touch.
All of the above is a short specimen of written English - in which there are several types of English/ Englishes - " kick your ass " cowboy-speak etc., but no particular features of your Nigerian English - but you should know better, since I am neither a native speaker nor a speaker of your Nigerian English - although, as an actor I can imitate any kind of spoken English that you would demand of me - Prince Charles, Forrest Whitaker ( approximately) ,Lady Macbeth, slightly more difficult , Wole Soyinka....I'll tell you a 419 story a little later , this week...
I hope that you are not about to disqualify George Orwell / Eric Blair who you quote - disqualify him from speaking any of the forms of standard English - because he was born in India or the impious Salman Rushdie, on the same grounds, for having been born in Bombay, the headquarters of Bollywood.
I attended primary school in Fulham, where I acquired the accent of that area and some of the culture that goes with it, Charlotte and I (I was one class ahead of her) being brought up by her parents ( my guardians) John Jeffrey-Coker and Aunt Nelly at 144 Sinclair Road where we lived, 1952-1955. Aunt Nelly (Charlotte’s mother - from Holland and indeed her brother Nigel) and Uncle Jeff instilled good manners in us - for example we distinguished between fibs and lies, said yes please and no thank you, wielded our knives and forks correctly, knew how to use our handkerchiefs
I had a Scottish step-father (John Patrick Johnson, Dundee, Glasgow, Edinburgh a decorated WW2 Naval Officer ) and of course, I speak and can write a very correct English and be a perfect gentleman when I so desire - have no qualms about meeting royalty and apart from periods of travel have mostly lived within an English language community, all of my life. There's also a culture , customs, traditions even a sense of humour, music/ musicality, dance, poetry, that comes with the language that you’re talking about. In 1963 - along with Violetta Luke and William Fitzjohn the other winners of an oral English prize awarded by the British council for our "O" level English performance, I read the evening news on SLBS a couple of times shortly thereafter - couldn't recognise my own voice ( people complained it was too British) but the same hypocrites never complained about Hannah Bright-Taylor or my first cousin Martin Williams who were news readers around that time. Much later, the drummer in our band Gipu Felix-George became the director of the SLBS.
Dear Farooq, when we sat for our "A "levels in English I smiled at little when I looked at the unseen piece of poetry ( piece of advice?) it was Ted Hughes' On the Move about the ton-up boys and no stranger to me in connection with D.H. Lawrence's "Sons of Lovers" I had gone past the oedipus complex. I think that I killed that paper. I must have. I must correct a mistake I made yesterday: My Better Half does not translate from Swedish, she translates from British/ American / New Zealand English into her mother tongue which is Swedish. She also studied English at the University of Washington which is in Seattle. Among the books that she has translated is Bruno Bettelheim's The Empty Fortress // Den tomma fästningen: infantil autism - symtom och behandling ( 516 pages ) which she mostly translated when we were in Nigeria). Last week she was teaching Ph.D. students Swedish as a foreign language. She speaks perfect English and I am of course one of her best students, all languages.
What do you make of the marginal man theory?
Before you dare reply to this - so that I may really pounce on you like a Bengal tiger and without any warning - in non-standard English if you please - remember what King Solomon said: All is vanity...
Now I must be off to see IZZY!!!!
Farooq A. Kperogi
School of Communication & Media
Kennesaw State University
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
Cornelius Hamelberg
Correction : Grammar (typographical) :Dear Farooq, when we sat for our "A "levels in English I smiled a little when I looked at the unseen piece of poetry..
Other corrections : my first cousin EDDIE Williams who was an SLBS news reader ( later on, for many years until recently, he ran a radio station on St: Martin , an island in the Caribbean )
In our time in secondary school we had great teachers - our art teacher Guy Massie-Taylor, in French Mr. White ( Canadian) and A.W. Rogers (Belgian) in English Mrs Fewry, Mr. Chapman (MA. Cantab) , Mr. Davies, in the fourth form Major A T von S Bradshaw ( a great admirer of China) in lower six Michael Brunson (who gave spoken life to the written word - he had read theology at Oxford where he was active in amateur theatre) and in upper six Bankole Thompson (affectionately known as "Banky" ( then a Wordsworth freak) an dof great importance at that time, The British Council
Cornelius Hamelberg
Dear Farooq,
What a boor you are!
I would say that "I am a native speaker" and I speak an educated, what you or your employers would call "standard English"
Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
"Shakespeare did not write Standard English because there was no Standard English when he lived. "Standard English"
started life only in the 18th century,"
?????
Sent: Tuesday, March 14, 2017 11:16 AM
To: USA Africa Dialogue Series
Kenneth Harrow
Shakespeare wrote in Elizabethan English. If you don’t thinkthat is different from standard English of today, just try reading some of his plays!!
They are just on the cusp of becoming incomprehensible to today’s speakers.
Furthermore, there were no institutions to standardize it. The spellings were completely up to publishers who made up different spellings as they saw fit.
Lastly, if you move from lansing Michigan to new York, you can say we use different words for different things, like pop vs soda etc. imagine living in a country without tv or radio to give a common language. Moving from one town to another would have created problems; and if you just try to understand the speech of northern English people now, you’ll get the point. Farooq is right: people who know English can read this message and understand it, but at home the speech in one place will certainly differ from that of another place.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
Cornelius Hamelberg
God created the universe with the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet
Long after the tower of babel , where the babble began
These opening lines so many beginners remember
Some lucky ones started even earlier
Today I look for this spell-checker
Others search desperately for Zimbabwe. Fact is
Man Friday has to adjust to the local conditions of wanderlust :
For better, for worse, when in Rome do as Rome does
If necessary Harrow, sings like a sparrow...
Olayinka Agbetuyi
Kenneth Harrow
Dear olayinka
I agree there are different “standard” englishes. One way to see it clearly is the language we teach. In Europe, a good number of years ago, they began to distinguish between the British and American variety by actually calling them English and American, or American English . when you signed up to learn the language, they made that distinction. We had a French boy, studying English, living with us here in Michigan, and he would correct our American English, or else simply not use it, for his homework assignments where he had learned the british variety.
Still, we do teach standard English—no doubt about it. Only we teach different varieties, and Nigerian English has to be taught in Nigeria or else some other variety will come to prevail.
(lots of jokes about the difference, especially when it comes to underwear, or whatever they call it in England and Nigeria)
also consider India with its enormous population learning a different variety there as well.
All this not to mention the really greatest difference, which is accent. That part is fascinating.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
Olayinka Agbetuyi
Cornelius Hamelberg
Dear Ken,
I wish that I could write this in Standard French or in Haitian French...
If the word is still free, I should like to clear the air, somewhat. This, after visiting John Andrews, my friend from California, this afternoon. A tear nearly came to his eye when he started singing in praise of the weather the year round, in California ...
This is part of a diary. I'm taking notes. If ever I touch this or any other topic about Naija or any place else it’s mainly to promote/ participate in or even be at the tail end of some kind of discussion.
This too, the lines in this posting are purely theatre from my point of view and you are one of many charterers in this drama, sometimes an avuncular overseer and patron to chaps like Ikhide, Adesanmi, Ochonu, Mbaku. Personally, I love, admire and respect the principles, honesty, forthrightness and dedication of, obviously, e.g. Ogbeni Kadiri, Chidi, IBK, Samuel Zalanga, Sabella Ogbobode Abidde.
There is also the impeccable - Oga Falola - sacrosanct , alone and all by himself in the special category...
(My friend says that the monotheists are those who believe in a highly centralised government - One God - whereas the polytheists believe in decentralisation, deregulation, relegation of powers (angels and messiahs, bishops, pastors, priests) and regional autonomy. As you can see, I'm strictly monotheist. Slightly on the other plane but not parallel with the Oga of Ogas - sort of on the level of the archangels, Chief Bolaji Aluko, Ayo Olukotun, and on the spiritual and angelic level - on the spiritual slope, like a lullaby , Funmiara, Jibrin Ibrahim, Rasfanjani. Then there are the rebels, like Gloria in excelsis Emeagwali and Toyin Vincent Adepoju. You may notice that I haver left the literati out of this judgement.
Happily, there are no demons in this forum. There is sometimes ignorance, yes, as one Rabbi prayed, "Father forgive them for they know nothing!", there are a couple of islamophobes and arrogance, yes, but not on the same level as Iblis...
I have no respect for those empty buckets who don't know Shakespeare and want to preach about him to those who were and are still his students, long before the empty bucket could begin to grasp the rudimentary Arabic alphabet. To tell you the truth, I enjoyed reading Amos Tutuola and fully understand and enjoy Nigerian Broken but I really don't give a damn about Nigerian English really, especially not some of the pretentious , highfalutin pontificating about it, some of which is as absurd as the same mutha something trying to correct Ebonics, saying it is out of line and trying to align it with (some quaint notions of) the state of the English Language in the last century when his Pa Blair was still alive. It's equally absurd trying to "correct" a rap dictionary - who di hell be he?
In Sweden we mostly speak Swenglish and nearly all of the examples I can give of malapropism etc. are hilarious. There are quite a few words that Swedish and Scottish have in common due to yesteryears' relations between the Scots and the Scandinavian Vikings, words such as barn (child) kyrka (church). Outside of Scandinavia, Germans learn Swedish more easily than e.g. Americans...
Fresh from Ghana, Cornelius Ignoramus' first teaching job in Sweden was at TBV (one of the leading language school of that era.) In the spring of 1972, I was employed by David Austin who said that I had a "British" type of accent and that seemed to additionally qualify me to run a course in "Advanced Conversation". Twice a week in the evenings ( after the first meeting the students suggested that)the rest of the classes were held alternately in students homes - to get away from the boring institutional atmosphere / environment - we put it to the vote (mostly young to middle aged ladies) who also, eventually, occasionally took out the china and so we had nice cups of tea in between talking about Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, Hyde Park, au pair girls, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, underwear, Women's Liberation.
In teaching English in Sweden and in Nigeria the same set of teething problems, namely home language interference - in the Swedish case mostly prepositions and in the case of Nigeria quite a different cultural environment and some of the hangups of its post-colonial culture going back to since the days of slavery (calling me Sir for example) pidgin being so close to the British English language thing, indeed a part of it , a close cousin, brother, other , of course localisms which serve their creative/communicative functions - expressions such as " 'Ow now / Ow weder (weather) - How are you..."the man is not on seat" ( out of the office) she has just put to bed ( she just gave birth to ...)
There was Chairman Mao's Paper Tiger ...
Fast forward, the situation we are in is akin to the first few paragraphs of Aravinda Adiga's The White Tiger which won the Booker Prize in 2008:::
"The First Night
For the Desk of:
His Excellency Wen Jiabao
The Premier's Office
Beijing
Capital of the Freedom-loving Nation of China
From the Desk of:
The White Tiger"
A Thinking Man
And an Entrepreneur
Living in the world's center of Technology and Outsourcing
Electronics City Phase 1 (just off Hosur Main Road)
Bangalore, India
Mr. Premier,
Sir.
Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English. "
Except of course if such a novel of the imagination were to be peopled by at least one outstanding character with a sense of humour and the action were to be situated in Nigeria and given the title "The Black Tiger", I for one could imagine the president’s little besserwisser speechifying speech-writer , professor wet chicken feather or professor chicken wings trying to write/ imitate the immaculate British English which I teach, or the American/Austr-alien/New Zealand/ Canadian/South Africa/ Zimbabwe English varieties with which we are so deeply familiar through their literature of both the written and the spoken word oft-times through direct contact, referred to as the oral tradition , I imagine that the little besserwisser who really doesn't know any better,would preface his letter thus:
"As someone or the other once suggested, a tiger does not proclaim his Negritude; he pounces but I must confess that BTW, I had better say it out , I'm black and proud and that's why I believe that in the national interest there are some things that can only be said in Nigerian English - and that the rest had been better left unsaid..."
Best Regards,
etc. etc. etc.
Cornelius
On Tuesday, 14 March 2017 22:29:24 UTC+1, Kenneth Harrow wrote:
Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
Thanks for the clarification.
So Standard English has a shelf life. Right?
Elizabethan English was standard in its day but fell out of fashion, somewhat.
Sorry Ken but I don't understand your last sentence:
"people who know English can read this message and understand it,
but at home the speech in one place will certainly differ from that of another place."
Are you talking about coding and the fact that speakers of the language switch codes to suit
the audience - or what? Kindly clarify.
Sent: Tuesday, March 14, 2017 5:18 PM
To: usaafricadialogue
Cornelius Hamelberg
Sir,
"Here I go, deep type flow
Jacques Cousteau could
never get this low"
(Wu-Tang Clan – Da Mystery of Chessboxin' )
I didn't mean to demean myself ( me)
May I also take the opportunity to say that by no means would I like to ruin or rain on your intelligent/ enlightened discussion with Oga Harrow and the other serious intellectuals like yourself.
I admit that your sensitivity filter /sense of intolerance for strong words is much greater than mine, but don't you think that revulsion in this instance is too strong a word ? I shudder at what you should think about Kperogi's venom and invective that he usually hurls at those with whom he disagrees; in my lexicon such invectives are nothing as kind as the rime in this lullaby - and I do hope that I'm speaking the kind of English that both of you understand, maybe, ever so slightly, differently. I do love rap and poetry.
But I have taken note of your disgust:
Every man has his own and it's exactly the way that I feel about certain kinds of pernicious corruption, carrion flesh.
The idea of eating pork fills me
with revulsion.
As Jesus of Nazareth told some of his people (the Pharisees) who I'm sure were 100% keeping kosher, "it's not what goes into your mouth but what comes out that (also) defiles us" - i.e. evil speech.
Of course what comes out of the anus
does not defile us... (good riddance)
I don't know which words Jesus was writing in the dust when some chaps were gathering to stone to death a woman who had been "caught" in adultery.
You don't have to indulge me.
About contributing to the "enlightened debate" I did say - like an Englishman, that it is my language that you are making this great fuss about. Now if e.g. Theresa May said on the BBC "I am a native speaker of standard English "- or some other kinds of English I'm sure that there would be no fuss about that. If she had asked, "Don't you understand me? Am I not speaking good Nigerian English" - she would have probably been accused of arrogance and racism. I myself speak good English, Swenglish and many other kinds of English as some occasions demand and I'm a master of them all. A master of my own speech, my own lines - Without your permission, I proclaim here and now, like Jelly Roll Morton who said that he "invented jazz "just wait and see. I myself can be exceedingly polite - good manners were instilled in me and the rule of thumb is respect begets respect. As far as respect goes, there is nobody in this forum that I fear more than Biko Agozino - because I know (special mystical knowledge) that should I trespass against him, he can - because he has the absolute potential to repay me in kind. As Imam Ali (alaihi salaam) said , so too I'm not afraid of anyone who is not afraid of me. Why should I be? But I'm taking your objection seriously; I had thought that from henceforth I would approach Kperogi's future essays with all the vicious critical acumen that I can muster (as a wikid critic who can deep-fry any bugger) - but in spite of it all he is as much a friend as the guy in the oval office...
Here’s John Oliver going on about Obamacare
I apologise. No longer will I disturb your peace of mind. If you see me less often in this forum it's because I'm (a) studying Torah , (b) working on a story and (c) spending more time with my Spanish guitar ...
Forgive me
Now I'm outta here
Sincerely Yours,
Cornelius
Olayinka Agbetuyi
Farooq A. Kperogi
So Standard English has a shelf life. Right?
Elizabethan English was standard in its day but fell out of fashion, somewhat.
Kenneth Harrow
There’s one more factor I’d like to have farooq’s opinion about here. I had learned, way back, that the evolution of latin into the romance languages—that is the change from a single language into many different ones, passing through different dialects to languages—came about because the local regional variants became increasingly distant from each other over time. That made great sense in the past because people didn’t travel very much, they remained close to home throughout their lives, and thus as language changed locally, the neighbor’s language became increasingly remote, to the point where, I’ve been told, as late as the 19th c, if you traveled from one village to another in Italy people couldn’t understand each other.
I was born in 1943, and I can tell you the accents in the different boroughs of new York were pretty different, esp Brooklyn, which we used to imitate to make fun of it. My family was mostly the Bronx, also w strong accents
Now it’s all gone. Not only the new York accent is all flattened out, not only are there millions of non-new Yorkers who have come and amalgamated into some kind of very mild accent, the differences between the boroughs is gone.
Same here in Michigan. A trace of Midwest accent, that’s what we have. But the shift into dialects and new languages is disappearing because we all move, our kids move, and most of all there is that one accent on the radio and tv or in the movies which is very close to the same thing.
In Africa, at least in the 70s, one had the impression again that regional differences, the wolof of Dakar (called frolof) vs the village was radically different. How many variants of hausa or Yoruba were spoken in Nigeria or across the region? And now, as more people move, as the media have become more accessible, has this process of a language splitting into many different dialects and then different languages begun to abate? I know small languages disappear, but I wonder if the creation of new languages is dying.
Which takes me to English: “world” English should become a zillion different languages, so that something like pidgin should become incomprehensible to “standard” Nigerian English speakers. But is this happening? And is Nigerian English moving away from british or American English? Or does standard English, taught in the schools, published in our books, flatten out the differences and impose a uniformity on the speech and language around the world? Will indian English become radically different from Nigerian English, or will the pressures of globalization impose a uniformity on them, keeping them mutually comprehensible and merely regional variants, or even close to the same language? And I wonder whose pronunciation will win over the long run, and why?
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Farooq A. Kperogi" <farooq...@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Thursday 16 March 2017 at 09:48
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - “An advice, ” “a good news”: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 1:16 AM, Emeagwali, Gloria (History) <emea...@ccsu.edu> wrote:
--
Samuel Zalanga
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
Olayinka Agbetuyi
Olayinka Agbetuyi
Kenneth Harrow
Hi Gloria
We share a common language, like Arabic, when we read it. But if someone from far off heard me, they’d quite like not understand a word I said
Cornelius Hamelberg
Dear Olayinka Agbetuyi,
Many thanks for your first intervention and more especially these your latest, very gracious comments, about which we are in complete agreement. I have just asked my mentor Ogbeni Kadiri about Ęyin l'ohùn' which he explains is like eggs, when you drop an egg you cannot re-collect / re-assemble it as a whole. The Rabbis say the same about Lashon Hara - that some words leave one's mouth or keyboard, like an arrow and when you shoot words like an arrow, you cannot recall them. According to the Talmud, "the tongue is an instrument so dangerous that it must be kept hidden from view, behind two protective walls (the mouth and teeth) to prevent its misuse."
Apart from my main man Ogbeni Kadiri I also have my grand repository of Yoruba ethics in the form of Oga Toyin Falola and Aderonke Adesola Adesanya's ETCHES ON FRESH WATER in some ways a sort of Ethics of the Fathers // Pirkei Avot
It's 16/3/2017 and you get me reminiscing some more, perhaps of some sociological significance - on the spot right here in my computer room in Enskede.
Re - concerning the many possible instances of "an African native English speaker born and raised in Africa " -
1. As was once forcefully brought to my attention by one Desmond Mcdermott an old friend in the 70's Stockholm - a Whitey from South Africa beating his chest and shouting " My Country!" - forced into exile. I was on the phone just now talking to Farooq (a South African Indian Farooq) who was explaining a little about the state of Anglo-Saxon South Africans , some of whom were bi-lingual since the Apartheid Boers had imposed their Afrikaans language on them and that there are twenty five official languages in South Africa. So, there are a lot of African native English speakers born and raised in Africa, not just Alan Paton and Brother Ezekiel Mphahlele our Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee (Afrikaaner parents) or Andre Brink - and many bilingual South Africans , jazz musicians, artists, revolutionaries whose company I have kept over many, many years...
2. As a speech analyst I can identify many kinds of diverse African accents - plus American - from Texas to Maine, various English, Australian - of course - Irish, Scottish etc. But this takes the biscuit : my friend's son Sundiata - born and raised in the South of Sweden almost shocked me out of my skin when he told me that he had not been living in the states (he sounded like Chuck D) how come , I asked him. Well , he had been listening to Cartoon Networks since he was about two days old...
3. Enter the biographical. In my case - an African born and partly raised in Africa where until the age of six, as I have said, many times, beating my chest proudly, I had acquired Fullah/ Fulani/ Peul language as my first language until the age of six when I was unceremoniously whisked off to Merry England - and to this day an eternal mystery to me how - tabula rasa - my knowledge of Fullani was completed erased from my memory, consciousness, everyday life, I believe because I no longer had any companions with whom I could speak it. I am angry about this. One of those things in life. It was only as late as 1990 something that my mother who had permanently emigrated to the UK in 1969 with my step father and my brothers Patrick and Michael - ( at which time my brother Harold had been sent packing to New York ) - and my Better Half and I had decided to continue our honeymoon in Ghana - it was only as late as that that my mother Adekumbi told me at length about the first six years of my life and a lot of other things. About the possibility of fully reacquiring Fulani apart from learning it - I have toyed with the idea of regression therapy - although I am a little apprehensive of its clinical associations and of possibly unearthing what could possibly be best not remembered. Sometimes, it's better to let sleeping dogs lie..
What is even more mysterious is how - and when - at which point I
acquired the English Language - and simultaneously at the same age
- at six - began to read, not just Winnie
the Pooh and Tales
of Sherwood Forest , but Aunt Nelly's " Woman’s
Own " (magazine) and anything else that I could lay hands
on. Aunt Nelly's women’s magazines gave me a precocious insight
into the inner workings and machinations and thought processes of the
Oyibo female mind as - much more experienced now, I understand them
even better - indeed that early childhood period coincided with my
falling in love with Miss Walsh, our school mistress (I have a faded
black and white school photograph with her standing besides us and
me sitting next to Jimmy Mannix who was my best friend then - I
remember how my heart used to beat with jealousy when the bloke who I
assumed was Miss Walsh's boyfriend, used to come to pick her up after
school and I could not understand or account for this feeling of
wanting to kick him in the shins, a feeling that almost overwhelmed
me. Charlotte and I were the only dark skinned people in the whole
school - and the rest of the school - almost the whole school (just
kidding ) - but in late winter a bunch of our classmates would be
waiting for us armed with snowballs with which to pelt us when school
was over, so we had to negotiate our way out of school, which
alternate exits to take. This was an almost daily occurrence. It was
all clean fun and of course we didn't know anything about racism
then, not even when a road worker ( repairing he road) once asked me,
" What time is it?" and I told him that I didn't know and
he asked me whether it wasn't it true that "darkies
"( Dark skinned people) could just take one look at the sun and
tell exactly what time it was ! Aunt Nelly was a stickler when it came to pronunciation - I should say paint box and not "pint box" - like an East ender - I heard that after they moved to Ikoyi - when they relocated to Nigeria, that she became personal secretary to Sir Abubakr ( could someone please confirm that?
At school - we went by bus - some of the kids used to tease Charlotte by calling her "Charlotte Cocoa". Once - the only time we set foot in a church is when some of the church people off Sinclair Road came to borrow me to play the part of one of the three wise men from the east - in the nativity play in the church. That's when In started feeling more important. About this racism thing I still vividly remember looking out of the window of the second floor of 144 and what did I see on the other side of the road but a young hooligan pulling at Charlotte's hair trying to snatch her school satchel from her ! I remember my heart pounding as I raced down the stairs crossed over the street and gave the boy the beating of his life - some karate sparks, kicks and punches. After which I think I was reported to Uncle Jess and Aunt Nelly as the greatest hooligan in the neighbourhood. It was something like Sonny's Lettah :
"soh me chuk him in the eye
and him started to cry
mi
thump one in him mout
an him started to shout
mi kick him
pan him shin
an him started to spin
mi thump him pan him
chin
an him drop pan a bin..."
Back in Sierra Leone, some transitions but simultaneously half living within the colonial expatriate community of mostly Brits, in the first form I remember it was at the morning assembly, the principal was giving his morning speech when he asked the assembly for the meaning of the word yoke - - I was in the front row so my hand shot up and I answered the question - for which the senior prefect congratulated me later - but it really wasn't a big deal - in form one we were then reading "Lorna Doone". One of my classmates was Omodele Wariboko, also Nestor-Cummings John, Richard Fairweather (English boy his father was a captain in the army) Leonard Gordon-Harris, Fowell Whitfield, Sylvester Young, Akintola Wyse (the wise) Cyril "Bamy" Sawyer, Desmond Easmon, George Morgan, Abisodun Wilson, Raymond Coulson, Ronald Dove, about ten classmates more. It was the brightest constellation of stars in the universe fully at home in the English language sphere and I doubt that any of us would be sending questions to the Kperogi column about the use of adjectives, word order, prepositions of the placing of adverbs not even in Latin at which we were all soon adepts ( in the first form Winston Forde - then in Upper sixth was giving me private lessons in Latin (said to be one of the backbones/ building bricks of the English Language - so to my consternation years later I could read articles about Islam in Latin, without much difficulty!)
It's 2102 and time for my late dinner. If You were from the Naija Delta I would be saying,
See you later alligator...
and many thanks if you were courteous enough to read this far.
As we say in Standard Swedish, Tusen tack
Cornelius
Olayinka Agbetuyi
M Buba
Prof Malami Buba
Olayinka Agbetuyi
Kenneth Harrow
Hi malami
I don’t agree with “de-linking” from English. I do agree with privileging local knowledge, but the mistake is to regard English as anchored in the cultural values of the west or the u.s. I know that is ngugi’s claim, but it is wrong. It takes languages as frozen.
Not only is English now global, delinking from the global tool that is now available to all is to delink from the body of knowledges being produced in English. That is to cut off your nose to spite your face.
I’d prefer the tutuola solution, or the pidgin solution: take possession of English and make it your own, do with it what you will, embrace the differences (which are not errors, except to those wishing to impose a dominant variety on all), and transform it. All great literatures, including English! Including irish! Including American even!! have done just that.
And so have African varieties unabashedly.
The notion that zulu or xhosa might give mda a greater, more “authentic” voice is totally wrong.
Why do I say that? Read glissant if you must ask.
Or ask nza the bird why he isn’t perching
Toyin Falola
Sent from my iPhone
Olayinka Agbetuyi
Assensoh, Akwasi B.
SIR Toyin:
Have safe and blessed travels in South Africa!
Your English is never mediocre. instead, it is very much
uncomplicated and smooth! I totally agree with what you told the people of the Sokoto Caliphate: to use Hausa; we need different forms of lingua franca all over Africa, something that Professor Wole Soyinka and other Pan-African Writers suggested years ago.
Enjoy the precolonial catalytic conference. Baba Ijebu (one of my legendary mentors) would laugh heartily at the description, "precolonial catalytic conference". To him, that would be book long! He would have asked you, SIR Toyin, if he (Baba Ijebu) needed an encyclopedia to use, to understand the title of the conference!😊
A.B. Assensoh.
Sent: Friday, March 17, 2017 12:45 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Olayinka Agbetuyi
Kenneth Harrow
Hi olayinka
I remember hearing/reading a long time ago that kids learn better in the mother tongues. It seems counterintuitive for any place on earth to educate their children in a foreign language. By high school age, in a country like Nigeria, or Senegal, I would make sure all kids had enough English or French instruction to be able to get jobs in those languages.
As far as a foreign country paying for instruction in another country, that is not reasonable. If you want an idealistic world, change the unequal distributions of wealth instead of asking for things that no one would do…..
On the other hand (isn’t there always another hand), the French emphasize la francophonie and pay for it in lots of ways. No one needs to pay for English, it is more desired than anything; and I noticed the Chinese are now building those Chinese studies and language centers. Lots of religions do the same, with Hebrew school, greek (for the orthodox) and Arabic.
I prefer being realistic, not idealistic, when it comes to language instruction. I would want my kid to be enabled by his or her education, meaning, let them get the languages they need.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
Farooq A. Kperogi
My own take, which I argued in Sokoto where I told them to use Hausa to teach all disciplines at the university level, is not about the ability or otherwise to use correct English but how best to access and use knowledge.
Salimonu Kadiri
I agree with you Malami Buba, that our future in Nigeria should be de-linked with English language. Nigerians speak and write standard English but, for instance, we don't have a standard hospital where our President can get treated when he is sick as it has recently been proved. Yet we have sixteen University Teaching Hospitals with personells that are verse in spoken and written standard English in Nigeria. Here follows the list of the University Teaching Hospitals in Nigeria and their appropriated budgets for 2016.
1. University of Lagos Teaching Hospital N212, 539,245
2.Ahmadu Bello University Teaching Hospital N230, 904,995
3.University College Hospital Ibadan N230, 904,795
4.University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital Enugu N218, 335,908
5.University of Benin Teaching Hospital N212, 886,502
6. Obafemi Awolowo Teaching Hospital Ile Ife N162, 622,221
7. University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital N166, 802,164
8.University of Jos Teaching Hospital N228, 717,880
9.University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital N169, 498,392
10.University of Calabar Teaching Hospital N201, 082,446
11.University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital N215, 151,873
12.Usman Dan Fodio University Teaching Hospital Sokoto N279, 000,000
13.Aminu Kano University Teaching Hospital N210, 380,376
14.Nnamdi Azikiwe University Teaching Hospital, Nnewi N166,188,931
15.University of Abuja Teaching Hospital N198,715,702
16.Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University Teaching Hospital N229,005,992
Beside the above University Teaching Hospitals, there is a State House Medical Centre in Abuja which is popularly called Presidential Hospital because it is specially designed and equipped to provide medical cares for the President, Vice President, their families, staff of the State House and other entitled public servants. Total budget for Abuja's State House Medical Centre in 2016 was $16 million or N3.87billion. The standard English speaking and writing physicians at our Teaching Hospitals cannot treat our sick president not to talk of ordinary Nigerians, in spite of the money budgeted for them. The quality and usefulness of spoken and written standard English in Nigeria are seen on our roads, waterworks, Oil refineries, iron & steel industry, animal breeding, electric generation and distribution and agriculture. Standard English my foot!!
S. Kadiri
Skickat: den 17 mars 2017 10:51
Till: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Ämne: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - “An advice, ” “a good news”: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
M Buba
Prof Malami Buba
Farooq A. Kperogi
School of Communication & Media
Kennesaw State University
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
Kenneth Harrow
Dear malami
There is an element of agreement perhaps we can share. I think much more important than the language is the perspective. European/western perspectives assume they are universal, and were totally autochthonous. Wrong on both counts. I don’t use the term afrocentric, but an afro-perspective is indispensable to counter the dominance of the European. Not the language.nigeria has many languages, a great advantage. You want to give up one of the key ones; instead, I’d want to take possession of it, make it Nigerian, keep it Nigerian, teach it Nigerian. Use Nigeria as the center for the language and the teaching. That’s legitimate, and positive.
The other thing is we each speak in and through the other. Europeans no less than anyone else. The more isolated we are, the less the Other is present to us, the more monotone, singular, limited, inhibited, and ignorant we become. I am dead set against notions of authenticity for that reason. The real authentic exists only with and through the Other.
Not hybridity or mixture, but a subjectivity that is partial and marked by many locations, many sites of enunciation. We inhabit multiple subjectivities. Perhaps we are ashamed of some, thing we are inferior in some regards; perhaps others make us feel superior, larger, more powerful. We deny some, are blind to some.
But I would hope we could come to accept our multiple subjectivities, and see them in more than one way.
Olayinka Agbetuyi
Olayinka Agbetuyi
Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
As far as I know, there are lots of Hausa language tapes and grammar texts, available for people to learn the language - not to mention numerous Hausa speakers.
Pedagogical exclusivism, epistemic isolationism and educational apartheid take place when you prioritize English as being the only possible language on the planet for instruction. Add to these wonderful concepts, linguistic imperialism and hegemony - of a former colonizer.
You don't have to be Hausa to speak the language, no more than you have to be Chinese to speak Chinese, as your post implies, somewhat. The same applies for all local languages. Professor Buba can choose to specialize in English- but that does not negate the essential fact that local languages, including Hausa, can be effective and desirable vehicles of instruction at various levels, along with, or, instead of, English. It is not about you or me, but about foundations for the future in terms of development and communication strategy.
I find Olayinka's bilingual and trilingual models innovative and attractive.
Sent: Friday, March 17, 2017 9:15 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - “An advice, ” “a good news”: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
Malami Buba
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
"When I enrolled as an undergraduate at the Bayero University in Kano many years ago, I didn't speak a word of Hausa. There are thousands of undergraduates and professors from other parts of Nigeria in northern universities who don't speak Hausa." Kperogi
As far as I know, there are lots of Hausa language tapes and grammar texts, available for people to learn the language - not to mention numerous Hausa speakers.
Pedagogical exclusivism, epistemic isolationism and educational apartheid take place when you prioritize English as being the only possible language on the planet for instruction. Add to these wonderful concepts, linguistic imperialism and hegemony - of a former colonizer.
You don't have to be Hausa to speak the language, no more than you have to be Chinese to speak Chinese, as your post implies, somewhat. The same applies for all local languages. Professor Buba can choose to specialize in English- but that does not negate the essential fact that local languages, including Hausa, can be effective and desirable vehicles of instruction at various levels, along with, or, instead of, English. It is not about you or me, but about foundations for the future in terms of development and communication strategy.
I find Olayinka's bilingual and trilingual models innovative and attractive.
Professor Gloria EmeagwaliGloria Emeagwali's Documentaries onAfrica and the African Diaspora8608322815 Phone8608322804 Fax
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Farooq A. Kperogi <farooq...@gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, March 17, 2017 9:15 PM
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - “An advice, ” “a good news”: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 12:45 PM, Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:
My own take, which I argued in Sokoto where I told them to use Hausa to teach all disciplines at the university level, is not about the ability or otherwise to use correct English but how best to access and use knowledge.
That's extreme pedagogical exclusivism, and it's a recipe not just for dialogic catastrophe on northern Nigerian university campuses but for unwarranted epistemic isolationism. This suggestion assumes that everyone (students and professors) at Usmanu Danfodiyo University--and other far northern universities--is Hausa. That's flat-out inaccurate. When I enrolled as an undergraduate at the Bayero University in Kano many years ago, I didn't speak a word of Hausa. There are thousands of undergraduates and professors from other parts of Nigeria in northern universities who don't speak Hausa. Are you suggesting that non-Hausa-speaking Nigerians have no place in universities in the far north?
If your suggestion is executed, several southern professors in northern universities (and they are many) would be fired since most of them can't teach in Hausa. More than half of the senior professors in my department in BUK were from the south. Why should money from the federation account fund this de facto educational apartheid?
Would you go the whole hog and suggest that every university in Nigeria should instruct its students in the local language of the community in which it'situated? How practicable is that? Or is this recommendation exclusive to Hausaphone Nigeria? If yes, why should Hausa-speaking Nigerians be treated differently from the rest of Nigeria?
There are just so many problems with this suggestion. For me, it's an indirect way to say Hausa-speaking Nigeria should secede from Nigeria since English is the adhesive that bonds together the disparate fragments of Nigeria.
Farooq
Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.Associate ProfessorJournalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & MediaSocial Science BuildingRoom 5092 MD 2207402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University
Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.comTwitter: @farooqkperogAuthor of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
Kenneth Harrow
Toyin said:
In terms of development generally, the reality is that English is the language of modernity. Take it or leave it, it makes no difference. The Asians etc are scrambling to learn English. Why? The 20th century onward is dominated by Anglo-American civilization, as demonstrated by the cultural sweep of this civilization, as suggested even by the origins of this medium in which we are communicating.
I think he sums up an indisputable argument, in the claims that English is the language of modernity.
But that language that toyin identifies is really what Farooq has been calling standard English.
That means, as I understand it, not the language of a specific culture, but rather, as toyin said, perfectly, the language of modernity.
The language that airplane pilots all around the world have to master adequately to land a plane in an airport. Or for technicians to learn, or those whose livelihood depends on global traffic.
Like kids learning what to say to tourists. Not the language of anglo-american civilization, toyin, as far as I can see. There is nothing whatever that is specific to a given culture. That’s why the words that are culturally specific, like slip or underpants or shorts or vest—all those words that are different in given cultures—are not the words that really matter in standard English, unless you are selling them as commodities. But when it comes to something like barrels of oil, or dollars, or Chinese words for currency, etc., become universal.
Words you need to know if you go to a hotel, or, more importantly, if you run the hotel; not words that are used in people’s homes.
Foreign words, flat words, professional words, words for those who are trained, not those who just grow up hearing the words.
Words like thanks and goodbye; not like how much? Where?
See ya’
Tata
Or words that change, quickly, like slang, in contrast with words used by tv announcers whose broadcasts are seen around the word.
By the way, what language is now being taught across the united states, not just increasingly in universities, but in high schools, middle schools—schools that advertise themselves as up to date, globally relevant? Chinese. mandarin Chinese. Meanwhile all those prestigious European tongues have practically disappeared: French, Italian, even german; while Spanish is managing to hang on, but, I recently learned, also struggling….
Toyin Falola
Sent from my iPhone
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
Kenneth Harrow
Hi toyin
I suppose this issue is largely seen differently depending where you are standing/looking from
I don’t know the real answer, so I’ll make it up. My impression now is that scandanavian countries, and the low countries of the Netherlands and to a lesser degree Belgium, have adopted English for their university systems, to a large extent. Maybe Cornelius can enlighten us on that question.
I am not in love w English, nor do I care that other countries adopt it. I am not in love with French, nor do I desire other countries to adopt it.
However, when morocco opened a technical university, with instruction in English, it was trying to move out of the orbit of the local Arabic or French higher education for the sciences and technical studies. Why shouldn’t they, if their grads would actually work better with other scientists around the world by doing so. I spent my entire long life trying to learn French well enough to read and function in it; I studied maybe 5 or so other languages, and regretted not working harder on African languages when I was younger.
Nothing can replace the study of wolof for people who want to live in Dakar. I’ve encouraged all my grad students to learn foreign languages, and two of them learned African languages.
So it is not by preferences for English, and even less for things American, that I can see the virtues of higher education in STEM being in English, especially in a country like Nigeria whose official languages includes English, and where we expect to be able to use English wherever you are in the country.
The heavy push for French, in francophone Africa, strikes me as artificial, and in fact my impression is that English has started to, or succeeded in, supplanting French as the “international” language to a large extent. I would mourn the ascension of English where other languages thrive, but as a parent who would care about his children succeeding, I’d definitely ask them to think about studying the language if they wished to enter into many professions for which it would be an advantage.
Can you imagine going to a major hotel almost anywhere in the world, now, and not have English available?
On the other hand, schooling should begin in local languages only, in my view.
Lastly, when I taught in Dakar, the English degree dissertations had to be written in French. For political reasons. That was an extraordinarily weird aberration. Now, I’ve been told, that isn’t the case.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Sunday 19 March 2017 at 17:51
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - “An advice, ” “a good news”: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
Ken and others:
Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
"By the way, what language is now being taught across the united states, not just increasingly in universities, but in high schools, middle schools—schools that advertise themselves as
up to date, globally relevant? Chinese. mandarin Chinese. Meanwhile all those prestigious European tongues have practically disappeared: French, Italian, even german; while Spanish is managing to hang on, but, I recently learned, also struggling…." Harrow
Chinese is giving English major competition, according to the above statement. Note the implications of Brexit. If the UK were to sink into relative obscurity, economically, that would give Chinese an additional boost. This is another reason why we have to think
multilaterally.
The 20th century was dominated by Anglo-American
civilization. Not sure of that for the late 21st and 22nd centuries.
Sent: Sunday, March 19, 2017 7:31 PM
To: usaafricadialogue
Kenneth Harrow
A prediction: china will not go away; its ascendancy will continue; the turn to them for economic and ultimately cultural ties has to grow. It might slow under trump since he is a moron, and as his actions for the pacific trade pact indicate, china will profit from his dumb mistakes and accelerate their regional domination.
A harbinger of this is Chinese involvement in Africa.
Perhaps an indication of the difficulty here might lie in the huge language gap; but the Chinese know that, and will foster the growth of Chinese language study as the French had done in the past.
Last point. I don’t believe the underlying factors that grew globalization and neoliberalism will go away, or even substantially diminish. That said, it will increasingly be wrong to refer to the global structures, to globalicity, in nationalist terms. It won’t be anglo-american or Chinese, but some other configuration grounded in the new alignments fostered by the large global entities that are emerging, and that might increasingly look like corporations more than nations
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
Farooq A. Kperogi
School of Communication & Media
Kennesaw State University
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
Toyin Falola
Reply-To: dialogue <USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Sunday, March 19, 2017 at 10:53 PM
To: dialogue <USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - “An advice, ” “a good news”: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
Samuel Zalanga
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
Malami buba
Cornelius Hamelberg
A short, complete aside :
The overriding argument is reducible to : Development! Development !Development ! With English we will develop!
Like Ginsberg's holy ! holy ! holy ! :
"The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!" ( Footnote to Howl)
Prof Falola's comments are probably calculated to tease out some repudiatory / explanatory/ explicatory response and to get the good discussion engine back on track?
1. Re - Arabic during the Golden age of Andalusia, (when the Arabs colonised Spain, which with dar al-Islam, they may one day want to re-claim.
Moses Maimonides who was known as Rabbi Moses ben Maimon and also known as RAMBAM , Judaism's greatest thinker of the Middle Ages composed his major works such as The Guide For the Perplexed in Arabic - but his Mishneh Torah was written in Hebrew
2. In Israel Arabic is taught as a second language. Perhaps, enough reason for Gaddafi to invite Israel to join the Arab League. Nuff said.
3. Sudan would surely not object. The greatest resistance to Arabic as the Black Continent's lingua franca of course will come from the Christians, the "polytheists" and some of the cultural chauvinists and Black African nationalists. I imagine my mentor thundering, "With language cometh civilisation , so why not Yoruba?" To which the Igbo and the Bi-afrans of course will object , maybe violently. The "smallies", the minority language groups have no say in the matter since there's no way they can dream of imposing their minority languages on the majority in e.g. Nigeria, not to talk of the whole of Africa - so they may much prefer English the unifier - to e.g. Arabic - mostly on religious grounds, what the propagandists will call " cultural imperialism" - the same kind of fearful reasons for keeping Islamic Turkey out of the EU, their watchword being "Watch out for your soul!" Counter-culture argument : Ayi Kwei Armah asked the question in either Why are we so Blest ? or Fragments : What happens to the soul of an African by who grows up being called Mike? There's also Armah's horrific polemic in Two thousand Seasons
4. But
to return to my new companion. I was greatly delighted with him, and
made it my business to teach him everything that was proper to make
him useful, handy, and helpful; but especially to make him speak, and
understand me when I spoke; and he was the aptest scholar there ever
was.
-- Daniel
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
So de facto, should British or American English become Africa's continental lingua franca? The whole world becoming English? What uncle-tom foolery! All said and done, that argument seems to be going in the direction of the grand conspiracy for Anglo-American "linguistic"imperialism , world domination and world government. First you grab them by their minds; control their minds. I don't think that the French are going to like that. They aren't stupid, but maybe they'll stay in the EU because British English has Brexited.
Last year in Marrakesh the Brits and I were complaining bitterly that neither the BBC nor CNN or any of them/ those were available in our five star hotel rooms and that we all had to content ourselves with parlez-vous France 24 - who of course have their own agenda. Just imagine: Morocco was only a colony for some thirty five years - and yet!
Where do you live? , the Brits asked me - in Sweden I told them, but I come from your very first colony in Africa and for the longest period too, 150 years : Sierra Leone and they all said, " Oh! Tony Blair was there!"
5. Consider : The USSR lost the cold war in Africa - second best students went to Russia, Patrice Lumumba University etc. (the best went to the UK, France Germany, USA.) African students were processed to speak Russia by the best language teaching perhaps in the world and returned home with at least a Masters degree to occupy higher positions - unfortunately those who had studied planned economy did not really, easily fit in into capitalist Kenya for example, obviously.
6. What's wrong with Hausa mathematics, Fulani poetry, Yoruba dialectics , art and music?
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
Ayotunde Bewaji
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
Farooq A. Kperogi
lgnorance breeds arrogance. A tale told by any idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Komolafe is right, "May God save us from ourselves". We should give the last word to Oga Farooq, and done. That way there shall be linguistic peace in the land, and Boko Haram will vanish. Shikena. Ire o.
Toyin Falola
Reply-To: dialogue <USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday, March 20, 2017 at 6:36 AM
To: dialogue <USAAfric...@googlegroups.com>
Cc: Tunde Bewaji <tunde....@gmail.com>, "john....@uwimona.edu.jm" <john....@uwimona.edu.jm>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - “An advice, ” “a good news”: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
Moses Ebe Ochonu
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
Moses Ebe Ochonu
To the great minds, let us stay close to the arguments. The thread on language is a good one as we all are seeking answers. Indeed, I have been forwarding them to UNESCO and the African Union.Whenever I am on the road, I contract the moderation of the site, and I also press the button without reading.I must confess that I am reading the insult and counter-insult for the first time. I apologize.I will do my private calls as usual.I take full responsibility.TF
Toyin FalolaDepartment of HistoryThe University of Texas at Austin104 Inner Campus DriveAustin, TX 78712-0220USA512 475 7224512 475 7222 (fax)
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
Kenneth Harrow
I don’t have time now to reflect on and respond to moses’s thoughtful comments. (class prep calling)
But it is SUCH A PLEASURE to read his postings that invite dialogue and reflection. THANKS moses. Please everyone, let’s try to keep at moses’s level
Secondly, the issue of English is duplicated radically in the francophone world where they are trying now to reshape French literature as something no longer centered in the metropole, where Litterature-Monde means francophone that isn’t euro-centered.
Please reflect on the importance of that. It is a highly contested notion, but really relates to this discussion when it asks how a language can cease to be centered in a single dominant culture, how it can be deterritorialized and then reterritorialized. No one asked the Indians, say, to do that; or the Nigerians, but it is happening every time someone in india or Nigeria opens their mouth and speaks in their voice—they reshape the language in the most natural way this inevitably happens.
And I believe it happens in Sweden, too, as they too reappropriate the other’s tongue and make it theirs.
Who then are the owners of the language??
Try reading Chaucer some time and you’ll see how what we are using now, to communicate, is really foreign from what was common in the 14th c
Languages are as alive as we are when we use it
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "meoc...@gmail.com" <meoc...@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday 20 March 2017 at 12:37
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - “An advice, ” “a good news”: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
It is sad to see this edifying discussion degenerate into this, but a few quick points preceded by a declaration:
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
Toyin Falola
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
Kenneth Harrow
Hi all
I’d like to refer to moses’s fourth point, the question of translation, so that cultural production not remain local.
As I work in literature and cinema, that issue is and has been for a long time a central question in African studies. Achebe vs ngugi.
Ngugi advocated writing in African languages, so as to remain true to the cultural, epistemological values.
Why not? One of my favorite writers among contemporary African authors, boris boubacar diop, opted to begin writing in wolof, and produced a magnificent novel, doomi golo.
On the other hand, if ngugi turned to writing in kikuyu, please note he then turned around and translated it into English for wider dissemination. Are there any novels or plays by ngugi that he has not had translated and published in English?
Soyinka translated a fagunwa novel—had that not happened, fagunwa would remain known only to Yoruba speakers. That is no worse than having Shakespeare known only to English speakers; but when the germans translated Shakespeare into german, that gave a tremendous boost to his expansion onto the world stage. Similarly when freud was translated into French, that enabled lacanian analysis (and the training for fanon) to become disseminated widely. When Lacan became translated into English, film studies and feminist studies turned deeply toward psychoanalytical approaches. Should I go on?
In film studies, carmela garritano distinguished between local twi films made in Ghana for local audiences. Had the films all remained in twi, they would have remained confined to accra and its region. But filmmakers like Shirley frimpong-manso wanted to make films that could be distributed world-wide, she turned to English, as well as to what Ghanaians termed professional looks, to polished post-production, as we have now seen in afolayan’s films
Now, folks, if afolayan’s films did not have English, or if there were no sub-titles, we who don’t speak the languages he employs in his films would be at a loss.
Subtitles, translations, these are how works enter into the global waves of culture. Not everyone wants to do this: but if you and I were to actually sit and talk about African literature, we have to have a text that we share in common, and that means sharing a language.
Let the author decide what language works for him or her in writing a novel. But he or she can’t control what languages others know. You can write for your own community, or reach out to others. And if you make a film that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions, you’d better find a way to reach the audience. That might well entail using hausa in northern Nigerian. And if your ambition is to go further, it has to be translated, subtitled, or dubbed.
Lastly, the original almost always is better than the translation. Much is always lost in subtitling. But a great translator can create something even better than the original.
As example might be seen in the adaptation of carmen by jo ramaka, his film karmen gei. I wouldn’t want to ask which is better, ramaka or bizet’s version: both are wonderful.
And of course, shakespeare’s own plays were based on earlier written texts as well. Texts written in other languages. Without translation there’d have been no Shakespeare either. We live by sharing across culture, and culture breathes when it can reach outside its own closely confined world.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "meoc...@gmail.com" <meoc...@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday 20 March 2017 at 11:30
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Cc: "tunde....@gmail.com" <tunde....@gmail.com>, "john....@uwimona.edu.jm" <john....@uwimona.edu.jm>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ³An advice, ² ³a good news²: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
It is sad to see this edifying discussion degenerate into this, but a few quick points preceded by a declaration:
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
Toyin Falola
- projects of translation, and adoption of certain ways of using languages can become framed as an elite project. Did Soyinka translate Fagunwa’s book for a massive public consumption? No, it is still an elite project. I was with the Sultan some years ago, and he was doing massive reproduction of Fodio’s works and other Islamic scholars in the very language which they used to produce them. I offered a strong endorsement. Is this not more important than thinking of people based in New York who are interested in that knowledge to write essays for their CV?
- If the people in New York are interested in Fodio, you need to convince me why those who produced the text should also be the translators for them. Why can’t you make the argument that the people in New York should go and learn Hausa and Ajami to access the text? So, why is this model different from that of an academic plantation?
- I am a fisherman in the Niger Delta, what do I care if texts are translated? If Ijo or Ogoni work well for me, why can’t tmy languages be further developed to enhance my citizenship and relevance as a human being? And If I go the University of Port Harcout, what is wrong for my University to allow me to write my PhD in Ijo language if this is what I prefer?
- become part of the critical platform for development;
- the empowerment of communities in ways in which politics and social engineering are built on their epistemologies and they can take whatever they want from others; and
- How African languages will become fully entrenched, never die, and then become reproduced through the education system at all levels.
Kenneth Harrow
Toyin
Cinema depends on subtitles, or dubbing, to reach out to mass audiences.
There is nothing elite about translating, in a sense, since another mass audience can be reached through translations of texts.
In Europe, especially france, dubbing is used for commercial films; subtitles for art house films
But translating books, not globally popular but just good books, African authored books, runs around $20,000 per book, and very few publishers can afford that. They need subventions. I know you know this; I am writing this for the list.
That is elitist, I guess. Unfortunately.
As far as setting translation of religious texts for mass audiences, versus scholarship, why not. They are apples and oranges. If the sultan’s goal is to advance broad religious knowledge, let him translation for the general readership. I see no harm in that.
I believe there is value in advancing scholarly knowledge, too, but the monies to support that, like the nea, often have to come from a reasonable national government. With trump we will descend into the dark ages.
If you are asking the people in “new York” to learn hausa in order to study hausa language texts, why not. Let’s face the reality that few will do so. Again, scholarship is of real value; but there is real, true, good value in the study of translated texts. Toyin, my degree was in comparative literature. If I have any regrets over my long career, it was in not having studied wolof in 1983 when I lived in Dakar. Instead I devoted myself to perfecting French so I could read the actual literature being written in French around the continent, including in n Africa. Only specialists worked closely on African languages. I do not regret not having become a specialist: I love all African literatures, and am glad I could read them in English, French, or translation. Without translations, I wouldn’t have known African oral literatures, which I taught over the years to probably close to thousands of students. Ditto for lusophone, for Swahili language texts, etc. why must it be only one? Can’t our goal be to have the originals published in their languages, and use translations for the best?
As for using African languages for higher education, you are oversimplifying the question. If you asked me if you should study wolof, let’s say, and use it up to the level of the ph d, in Dakar, I’d say two or three things. One, if it is a question of studying wolof history or literature, you have to be fluent in the tongue to use it at a university level. Just as our students need to know Yoruba if they want to be specialists in Nollywood cinema (or hausa, if they are doing the north); and learning igbo for igbo films would be something I would want to require of my students too.
If they are studying math at the college level, and did not know English, or even French I suppose, you would be isolating them from the scholarship that requires connections with publications and conferences around the world. Those conferences are held in English. As moses said, it is not a “national language” in that instance. It is a global language.
I can say, like it or not. I spend a lot of time in france, and frankly I usually am put off, or detest, the encounters with English—they are targeting people who do not know French, and my goal remains to try to function in French when in france. if I could function in wolof in Dakar, my experience would be immeasurably enriched.
But in Nigeria, if you insist the entire faculty function just in ijo, whom would you be excluding? Not only other Nigerians, but also those outside Nigeria, like me, who might wish to lecture there, or connect with the students there, etc.
Wolof is not the only language that matters in Senegal: you can’t exclude nnon-wolof speakers, or insist all students master it, to function. That’s what Selassie did with his crazy Amharic requirements in Ethiopia—a horrendous policy that only accentuated the repression of others—in fact of the majority of the country.
You have to distinguish between disciplines. The positive goals you cite at the end of your intervention below are completely relevant in the arts and humanities, and I agree with them. They are counterproductive in the sciences.
I guess I would have to say that we can’t hold on to our languages at all cost. The costs are too high. My father studied Yiddish in his old age; and me, I hope to study a few languages now that I am on the threshold of retirement. But not so as to preserve them—rather so as to enjoy entering into their worlds.
The English that I speak, that is changing daily with the inclusion of phrases and words that I can’t stand—is alive, and you and I can’t stop that process from happening.
On the other hand, the series of books I edit for msu press is very interested in African texts in translation from African languages. Our board of about 20 people all emphasized that, so many of us agree with the spirit of your goals. I agree we are mutually empowered when using African languages in relation to their texts and cultures, and ideally the comparative studies would include work on the languages. I see it in my field, literature, cinema. Not STEM, not medicine, and definitely not for airplane pilots, all of whom when doing international flying have to use English, even in their home countries. Weird, but true.
And this is true even for the language of music, without words; of dance. Yes, of all the cultural arts, of all the philosophical, intellectual uses of language. But not physics.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Tuesday 21 March 2017 at 10:05
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ³An advice, ² ³a good news²: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
Ken:
We keep elevating the discussion. But I get more and more confused.
Are we embedded in an elite project?
1. projects of translation, and adoption of certain ways of using languages can become framed as an elite project. Did Soyinka translate Fagunwa’s book for a massive public consumption? No, it is still an elite project. I was with the Sultan some years ago, and he was doing massive reproduction of Fodio’s works and other Islamic scholars in the very language which they used to produce them. I offered a strong endorsement. Is this not more important than thinking of people based in New York who are interested in that knowledge to write essays for their CV?
2. If the people in New York are interested in Fodio, you need to convince me why those who produced the text should also be the translators for them. Why can’t you make the argument that the people in New York should go and learn Hausa and Ajami to access the text? So, why is this model different from that of an academic plantation?
3. I am a fisherman in the Niger Delta, what do I care if texts are translated? If Ijo or Ogoni work well for me, why can’t tmy languages be further developed to enhance my citizenship and relevance as a human being? And If I go the University of Port Harcout, what is wrong for my University to allow me to write my PhD in Ijo language if this is what I prefer?
I am looking for answers that will tell us how we can maximize the ability of indigenous languages to:
1. become part of the critical platform for development;
2. the empowerment of communities in ways in which politics and social engineering are built on their epistemologies and they can take whatever they want from others; and
3. How African languages will become fully entrenched, never die, and then become reproduced through the education system at all levels.
Olayinka Agbetuyi
Olayinka Agbetuyi
Kenneth Harrow
Ola,
I dare say local scientific practice is one thing, and it is very very limited in terms of the science itself.
You can’t go international w a local language. And international is where science is practiced and developed; local is where it is taught.
You have to extend linguistically if you want to get past the local. German or not, I doubt you will find a reputable german mathematician who doesn’t attend international conferences, and you can be sure of the languages being used there.
I wonder if you have studied math, ola?
It is almost without any language at all, except for signs and formulae. i.e., it has its own language.
(but if you want to talk about it with others, you and they must share a language)
k
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
Kenneth Harrow
Hi ola, I perhaps expressed myself poorly. How can we discuss a book if we don’t speak the same language. How can we read the book, unless it is written or translated into a language we both understand.
I take your point that translation opens us up to other languages. But it also opens us up to the closing down of the original language, if it is a minor text. Maybe we need to bring in guattari’s work on kafka and minor languages, and adejunmobi’s now classic essay on Nigerian cinema also under that rubric of the minor literature.
By sharing, we need to reach across a divide. I didn’t mean, by sharing, that there was a monopoly in this process.
I like your notion of this entailing an expansion of literature in all the senses you are indicating.
But I wonder if it might also entail exclusion. Here comes the rub. Who decides what gets shared, what gets translated, what gets distributed. This was toyin’s worry about the domination coming from “new York.” As someone who comes from Michigan—a very small, invisible location from the point of view of New York—I appreciate toyin’s concern.
Lastly, your evocation of music crossing borders, like rap, is wonderful. There is definitely a cinematic correlation to that. It can be awful—and be called global cinema. Or it can be really enriching, as so many new wave films were, and ideally, when we study indian cinemas in Nigeria, we will see that cross-fertilization you are celebrating.
With literature it is harder, right? People up north can watch a film entirely in hindi, and enjoy it. I can even hear a poem in a foreign language I don’t know, and love its sound.
But a novel? At that point, we need to share at least enough so that I would be welcomed in.
(khatibi, Love in Two Languages, the most beautiful of texts to speak of this “sharing”—even under colonial rule in morocco)
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Olayinka Agbetuyi <yagb...@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Tuesday 21 March 2017 at 15:30
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ³An advice, ² ³a good news²: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
Apologies to all that I have been away from my internet connection for the past 48 hrs or so to attend to other duties. Hence I did not willfully intend a guerilla contribution.
Ken.
You stated that if we talk of African Literature then we need to have a text we share in common and that implies sharing a language. As a comparatist and translator I disagree.
Let me begin by saying I share all of your scholarly interests from film studies to translation studies to psychoanalysis and literature but also musical arts, but not so deep in films.
The whole purpose of translation studies is to grow a body of languages in literature through which themes, topoi and styles in literature can be studied across linguistic formations, including introducing new styles into languages where they previously were lacking. So translation studies does not imply sharing A common language but sharing common languages (the more the merrier.)
As I maintained in the introductory essay to my Riddles of the Divine (which will definitely be in the public domain this year) literary translations afford the literary arts the opportunity to catch up with a practice that is already common place in the musical arts particularly popular music.
A translation of Fagunwa by a native Hausa who understands Yoruba enough need not go through Soyinkas English translation to be valid.
It may introduce stylistic effects peculiar to the Hausa literary arts that are neither in the original Fagunwa text nor in Soyinka's English translation.
That Hausa translation may in turn spawn an English translation all of which would develop the field of translation studies in Hausa language.
Translation studies can be done in any language. A Hausa translation studies will examine the Hausa translation of the text under consideration alongside the two English translations: the one directly from the source text and Soyinka's (with the possibility of another Hausa translation) plus the source text.
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------
From: Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu>
Date: 21/03/2017 14:13 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - ³An advice, ² ³a good news²: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
Ken:
We keep elevating the discussion. But I get more and more confused.
Are we embedded in an elite project?
1. projects of translation, and adoption of certain ways of using languages can become framed as an elite project. Did Soyinka translate Fagunwa’s book for a massive public consumption? No, it is still an elite project. I was with the Sultan some years ago, and he was doing massive reproduction of Fodio’s works and other Islamic scholars in the very language which they used to produce them. I offered a strong endorsement. Is this not more important than thinking of people based in New York who are interested in that knowledge to write essays for their CV?
2. If the people in New York are interested in Fodio, you need to convince me why those who produced the text should also be the translators for them. Why can’t you make the argument that the people in New York should go and learn Hausa and Ajami to access the text? So, why is this model different from that of an academic plantation?
3. I am a fisherman in the Niger Delta, what do I care if texts are translated? If Ijo or Ogoni work well for me, why can’t tmy languages be further developed to enhance my citizenship and relevance as a human being? And If I go the University of Port Harcout, what is wrong for my University to allow me to write my PhD in Ijo language if this is what I prefer?
I am looking for answers that will tell us how we can maximize the ability of indigenous languages to:
1. become part of the critical platform for development;
2. the empowerment of communities in ways in which politics and social engineering are built on their epistemologies and they can take whatever they want from others; and
3. How African languages will become fully entrenched, never die, and then become reproduced through the education system at all levels.
Olayinka Agbetuyi
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
Olayinka Agbetuyi
Olayinka Agbetuyi
Olayinka Agbetuyi
As far as I know, there are lots of Hausa language tapes and grammar texts, available for people to learn the language - not to mention numerous Hausa speakers.
Pedagogical exclusivism, epistemic isolationism and educational apartheid take place when you prioritize English as being the only possible language on the planet for instruction. Add to these wonderful concepts, linguistic imperialism and hegemony - of a former colonizer.
You don't have to be Hausa to speak the language, no more than you have to be Chinese to speak Chinese, as your post implies, somewhat. The same applies for all local languages. Professor Buba can choose to specialize in English- but that does not negate the essential fact that local languages, including Hausa, can be effective and desirable vehicles of instruction at various levels, along with, or, instead of, English. It is not about you or me, but about foundations for the future in terms of development and communication strategy.
I find Olayinka's bilingual and trilingual models innovative and attractive.
Sent: Friday, March 17, 2017 9:15 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
My own take, which I argued in Sokoto where I told them to use Hausa to teach all disciplines at the university level, is not about the ability or otherwise to use correct English but how best to access and use knowledge.
That's extreme pedagogical exclusivism, and it's a recipe not just for dialogic catastrophe on northern Nigerian university campuses but for unwarranted epistemic isolationism. This suggestion assumes that everyone (students and professors) at Usmanu Danfodiyo University--and other far northern universities--is Hausa. That's flat-out inaccurate. When I enrolled as an undergraduate at the Bayero University in Kano many years ago, I didn't speak a word of Hausa. There are thousands of undergraduates and professors from other parts of Nigeria in northern universities who don't speak Hausa. Are you suggesting that non-Hausa-speaking Nigerians have no place in universities in the far north?
Kenneth Harrow
Ah, some day.
I hope so.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
"We live by sharing across culture, and culture breathes when it can reach outside its own closely confined world." Harrow
Agreed. Can English not be translated into Swahili? Translation is a multilateral process. For wider dissemination, Ngugi could have translated into Chinese as well.
I don't get your point about Ramaka's Carmen Gei. Is an adaptation the same as a translation?
Yesterday I discovered that the BBC will be broadcasting in Yoruba , Igbo and Pidgin this year, in addition to Hausa. I am happy that they were able to find scholars of indigenous African languages at Unilag etc to help in this project, and did not have to go to Mars to get help.
Sent: Tuesday, March 21, 2017 7:39 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Cc: tunde....@gmail.com; john....@uwimona.edu.jm
Olayinka Agbetuyi
Assensoh, Akwasi B.
Sure, Brother, I will send to you a copy of the review of the book by our Sister when published.
Sorry about Dr. Troy Allen. We went online and read about his death at 56 years old. Sad!!
Blessings to you and Lady Pat!
Brother A.B.
Kenneth Harrow
This is nice enough. but more than the language is at stake here. I’ve often felt the heavy hand of disproportionate and even epistemic violence when the major western news services, like cnn and even the sacred bbc, are the global news sources, and those news programs generated in other locations, especially in the global south, are not broadcast in the global north.
The bbc presents itself as an absolute truth, and it is so so easy to accept their take on the news as if it were above regionalism. Only when they start reporting on a particular story in a particular locale that you know well, that their pressure to take their word as absolute truth can be questioned. I’ve had that experience more than once in their broadcasting news about Rwanda or the congo that was wrong, and when their approach of denigrating opposing views seemed highly obnoxious.
News goes one-way on the global streams.
I am glad that their Africa, and india, services will include more languages. But if it is the same old bbc news going in to a region, then the problem of eurocentrism will not be resolved, but in a sense made even worse since their “authorized” take will assume a priority.
Gloria’s posting of alternative news sources actually becomes all the more important in that regard.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
Salimonu Kadiri
Thank you Ayotunde Bewaji for deciphering the message by looking at the messenger. In Nigeria, English was imposed on us as the official language of communication. In the name of justice, those who imposed English on us as the official language ought to have given all Nigerians access to schools where they should learn how to read, write and speak the official language, English. English language is not spoken at home in Nigeria but indigenous languages depending from which part of the country one comes from. As Samuel Zalanga has rightly pointed out, English is the language of the elites in Nigeria.
Being educated in Nigeria implies fluency in, or mastery of, spoken and written English language and nothing more. That was why after independence in October 1960 when the British officials departed Nigeria, Nigerians stepped in to fill their jobs, play their roles, inherit their salaries and privileges, and assume their attitudes in regarding the non-English speaking masses of Nigeria as inferior people doomed by God. "Stepping into jobs left behind by the British" Chinua Achebe wrote, "Members of my generation also moved into the homes in the former British quarters previously occupied by members of the European senior civil service. These homes often came with servants - chauffeurs, maids, cooks, gardeners, stewards - whom the British had organized meticulously to 'ease their colonial sojourn.' Now following the departure of the Europeans, many domestic staff (Nigerians) stayed in the same positions and were only too grateful to continue their designated salaried roles in post-independent Nigeria. Their masters were no longer European but (Nigerians) their brothers and sisters. This bequest (on Europeanised Nigerians) continued in the form of new club memberships and access to previously all-white areas of towns, restaurants, and theatres (p.49, There Was a Country)." Just because Achebe and people like him were certified English speakers and writers they were licensed to live like Europeans over the masses as appointed British slave overseers in Nigeria. By 1964, more Nigerians acquired academic degrees in English language and they demanded the same standard of living as the one enjoyed by Chinua Achebe and his cohorts. Since Federal government was not able to absorb all English degree holders into the civils service or parastatals, ethnicity and nepotism became major means of competing for senior service positions in Nigeria.
In the beginning, it was thought that knowledge in English language would enable Nigerians to acquire skills in Science, Medicine and Engineering for the development of verse mineral and forest resources of Nigeria and for the benefit of all Nigerians. However, acquisition of degrees in science, medicine and technology by Nigerians have had the same effect as degrees in English language or any other subject on Nigeria's industrial and economic developments. By 1964, people were appointed to, or employed into, positions that were unrelated to their professional degrees. Thus, Dr. Okechukwu Ikejiani, a medical practitioner was appointed a full-time Chairman of the Nigerian Railway Corporation and when he left by 1965, he was appointed Chairman of the Nigerian Coal Corporation. This trend continued after the civil war till date. The current President of Senate was born in London and received his education as a medical doctor there, but from day one when he entered the Nigerian shore, he has never practised medicine. He was employed as a Bank Executive and when he ran the bank into bankruptcy, he joined politics to become Governor of Kwara State for eight years from where he progressed to be current Senate President. Similarly, the former Governors of Rivers, Delta and Ondo states, Drs Peter Odili, Oduaghan and Olusegun Mimiko are Physicians by profession but they have never served the nation as medical practitioners. If the socio-political, economic and industrial development of Nigeria are considered, professors of English, Economics, Law, Science and Engineering are inseparable from Alhajis, Imams, Bishops, Reverends and Pastors. They all live beyond their legitimate incomes and they steal appropriated developmental funds with impunity.
Samuel Salanga made very important observation when he wrote, "The money that was used to subsidize the acquisition of western education could have been used to provide rural clinics or healthy drinking water etc., to ruralites, but it was appropriately thought that investing in higher education would help in nation building. Unfortunately, in many cases, the money was used to subsidize the education of people who now acquired an elite status in the country based on their western education and acquisition of the language. And they used their knowledge and positions to marginalize the ordinary people who never received the opportunity to be educated." The last sentence above could have stated that those whose education have been subsidized in Nigeria have used their acquired knowledge in English language and positions in the society to exploit and impoverish ordinary Nigerians who were denied access to schools for education in English language. Professor Malami Buba had asked rhetorically, ".... what's the whole point about pointing out errors in Nigerian English?" In order to answer that question we need to ask, how many spoken and written English grammars make - a cup of Gari or rice?; a kilogram of yam?; a watt of electricity?; a litre of potable water?; a litre of refined crude oil?; and a kilogram of beef? etc. Since the equivalent of spoken and written English grammars in Nigeria to the aforementioned products on which Nigerians depend for their daily living are zero, pointing out errors in Nigerian English is a useless mental gymnastic. It is valueless. Knowledge of English in Nigeria is nothing but ego-boosting personal chauvinism and those in command of the English language are parasites living on the labours of non-English educated working masses. That is why, a parasitic English Professor could shamelessly declare, "I write my language columns (in the Daily Trust) because I am paid well to do so (Forum's thread, 29 October 2016)." On March 14, 2017, he marketed the sale of his abstract knowledge on this list serve thus, "I am out. Gotta go teach 'native English speakers' some English to pay the bills." During Babangida dictatorship in Nigeria in 1986, academic degrees were called meal tickets whereby possessors of abstract knowledge lived luxuriously without productive work.
Nobody is advocating that English should be abolished as a language in Nigeria. What is being said is that the English language has deprived Nigerian children of their original thoughts in science and technology as dictated and experienced in their geographical environments which are quite different from that of Europe and America. Today because of English language, Nigerians are mentally and technologically dependent on Europe and America for the development of Nigeria. But, Europe and America would rather give fishes to some Nigerians serving their interests in Nigeria instead of allowing Nigerians to become fishermen. As Mao Tse-Sung rightly postulated, if you give a person a fish, he will eat fish only for a day, but if you teach him how to fish, he will eat fish everyday. One of the first thing the Englishmen did when they colonized Nigeria was to steal our technologies and destroy their foundations. A typical case was that of common salt narrated by Professor Kenneth Onwuka Dike in his book, Trade & Politics In The Niger Delta (1830 - 1885). He wrote, "Consul H.H. Johnston noted in 1888: A native salt industry of old standing continues. The salt is made extensively by Jakrymen from the leaves of a willow-like tree not unlike the mangrove; which are burnt; the ashes are soaked and washed, then evaporated; the residue represents native salt, which is even now preferred for many uses to introduced salt (p.22)." This was how the Itsekirimen, wrongly spelled Jakrymen, produced commonsalt in 1888 before their production of salt was destroyed and Nigeria became a market for British salt. Can any Itsekiriman in Nigeria today produce salt today? My guess is that he would probably be able to tell the chemical formula of salt in English which is sodium chloride (NaCl) but he will not be able to produce salt. A relevant case nowadays is that, Nigeria is a major exporter of crude oil and has four crude oil refineries manned by Nigerians whose brains are boiling with sophisticated formulae in English about petro-chemical Engineering and oil refinery but they are incapable of refining crude oil for Nigerians even though they are highly remunerated and they get all kinds of fringe bensfits, including concubine allowances. All ministries, departments and agencies in Nigeria, designed to solve the nation's social, political, economic and industrial problems are manned by Nigerians who speak and write Buckingham Palace English, but none of the problems for which they are employed or elected has been solved. Rather, and for instance, the cause of darkness of darkness, for Nigerians is the cause of the shinning light in the bank accounts of Nigerian officials at home and abroad. To the Professor of standard English, those who cannot generate electricity, pump potable water, refine crude oil, build motor-able roads and produce iron and steel, possess very high IQ, as long as they can speak and write standard English. If Nigeria is being ruled with any of the indigenous languages, it would not have been possible for the officials to engage in massive looting of the treasuries without facing citizens' anger and revolt. Tell Nigerians the real value of millions, billions and trillions of peoples' money stolen in indigenous languages Nigerians would massively and definitely react like the Islanders did to their Prime Minister, Daviõ Gunlaugsson, when it became public knowledge that he was engaged in tax evasion through a Panama brief case company. Fela once said, Your eyes e they red, e no fit light cigarette; and I say, your standard Buckingham Palace English e no fit bring water for drink, e no fit shine electricity for house, e no fit bring fujel from crude oiyele, your grammar e don turn hospitals for mortuaries and your grammar e don blow open all our roads wey e don become grave yards for vehicles and people. A beg, bring back my indigenous language.
S. Kadiri
Skickat: den 20 mars 2017 08:52
Till: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Ämne: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - “An advice, ” “a good news”: Errors of Pluralization in Nigerian English
Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
Diversionary tactics, Ken. We are not talking about content but structure, so to speak.
Besides, you cannot applaud one country for resurrecting a dead language, and discourage others from fully recognizing, utilizing and celebrating their living indigenous languages. Spurious arguments about translation, translatability, viability, accessibility and what not, have limited value once you take into consideration the self-sustainably large population numbers we are dealing with.
Sent: Wednesday, March 22, 2017 9:15 AM
To: usaafricadialogue
Olayinka Agbetuyi
Olayinka Agbetuyi
Pamela Smith
“Soyinka translated a fagunwa novel—had that not happened, fagunwa would remain known only to Yoruba speakers…” – Ken Harrow
Ken, I’m not sure this claim is accurate. Literary translation is alive and well. See below a cobbling together of a Fagunwa works short list I am aware of. Granted, Soyinka led the way, but others have continued in the same path in both ENGLISH AND FRENCH. Availability/circulation may be a different story. Also note that in the case of the publication of the Smith and Ajadi translations of Igbo Olodumare, completed in the same year, the latter beat the former to the publishers in a market that cannot sustain duplication – the situation (in the absence of a literary clearing house) in a couple of instances I am aware of.
1. Igbo Olodumare -- English translation titled The Forest of the Almighty, by Pamela J. Olubunmi Smith, PhD dissertation, University of Washington, 1985 – Unpublished, but Excerpts published in numerous essays
- In the forest of Olodumare, A translation of D. O. Fagunwa's Igbo Olodumare, Translated by Wole Soyinka (2010).
- Forest of a Thousand Demons, A translation of D. O. Fagunwa's Ogboju Ode ninu Igbo Irunmale, Translated by Wole Soyinka (1968).
- Mystery of God, A translation of D. O. Fagunwa's Aditu Eledumare (translated by Olu Obafemi, 2010).
- The Novel of D.O Fagunwa - A commentary by Ayo Bamgbose written in ENGLISH
- The Forest of God, Annotated translation of D. O. Fagunwa's Igbo Olodumare by Gabriel A. Ajadi, a PhD dissertation (Revised edition, 2005).
- The Expedition to the Mountain (The Third Saga) an English translation of Fagunwa’s Irinkerindo, by Dapo Adeniyi, (1994).
- ALL 5 FAGUNWA NOVELS HAVE BEEN TRANSLATED TO FRENCH by Abioye
- I am sure there are others which further search would unearth.
Also, I know Igbo and Edo friends and former classmates, born and raised in parts of Yorubaland (Lagos and Ibadan especially) who read Fagunwa’s Ogboju Ode during our Yoruba course/class reading/studies much better (more proficiently) than I did (as a poor Krio-speaking Yoruba learner).
From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafric...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Olayinka Agbetuyi
Sent: Tuesday, March 21, 2017 6:39 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Kenneth Harrow
Hi Gloria
I didn’t actually applaud Israel for resurrecting Hebrew—just noted it, and ditto for Ireland. You are mistaking recording the situation for applauding it. Nor am I discouraging anyone; but examining the question.
If I have a position, it isn’t on languages per se, but skepticism on the role of language as embracing some authentic cultural values.
I would try to sustain African languages, but am skeptical that state interventions are meaningful in respect of language usage. I think languages change through use, not through dictum.
Most of all, I was not trying to avoid the question, but examining, thinking about its implications. Translations and adaptations are central issues for my field, and their implications aren’t obvious
If you want to keep us focused on larger state policies, that’s fine. But I am not trying to evade anything; just thinking out loud
I do feel strongly about what I wrote concerning the bbc.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
Kenneth Harrow
Thanks for the correction, pam. As for the alive and well part of literary translation, there I think it is more questionable. The costs have made it impossible for a vast body of works to be translated, works including classics of African literature in both African languages and European ones.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
Kenneth Harrow
Agreed. A good thing.
Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
Ken,
I certainly agree with you in terms of the content of the BBC.
G
Cornelius Hamelberg
( Ken &Gloria)
or - (still a little short on poetry)
as the Professor of Buckingham Palace English (having not spent any time near the place)
would much prefer,
"Birds of the same feather"
I think Malcolm X was punning on his name Malcolm Little
when he said about some upstart who still doesn't know any better:
" They taught you little"
...
Olayinka Agbetuyi
Olayinka Agbetuyi
Olayinka Agbetuyi
Kenneth Harrow
Dear olayinka
Your goals of expanding the readership in other languages is a fine one. I don’t want to quibble too much here, but I don’t think legislation can create readerships as you envision it.
I do agree in education in indigenous languages, up to the 2ndary levels; after that, it would be wrong to lead students away from the use of languages, and I suppose English in particular, in certain fields that communicate in that global language, just as it would be wrong to avoid indigenous languages in the arts.
I have railed against the confines of an English only education in my field, literature, and against the token study of foreign languages that precludes the accomplishment of sufficient literacy to be able to read literature, or study cinema, in foreign languages. I want my students armed, able to read in the original texts or films created in foreign languages.
The same goes for African students studying in Africa.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/