What was that?
Ogantable….something that one can not finish counting.
Uncountable, but to our not so tutored ears, it sounded like, ‘ogantable’.
Learning the English Language was not so easy for me. I can remember making some innocent errors in the beginning.
However, thank God for little mercies. Nobody called the mother tongue, in this case, Yoruba a vernacular.
In fact, I started learning in Yoruba.
A….aja
B….bata
D….doje
E….ejo
E….eye
T…..tafa tafa
U…..uku uku
W….walah
Y…..yanmu yanmu
From there, we started reading the ,Alawiye series by J.F. Odunjo. In the senior classes we graduated to the D.O. Fagunwa mystery books.
Just before then, we had started reading the Yoruba Bible. In actual fact,we were reading letters for our grannies. We were also called upon to write the replies.
And, to tell the truth, the replies were hardly easy. The dictators would usually want the letter to personalise them.
‘Greet him o’.
So, how do you write that in a letter. If you tell them that you’ve done the greeting, they would ask you to read what you wrote.
That’s the problem.
You then read, ‘Omo mi owon’.
They would ask if that was all the greeting you could do.
Or, how do you do this, ‘Greet them so that I’ll be hearing that you did so?’
One interesting incident happened when my grand uncle came back from England with his wife and two children. The husband and wife spoke unblemished Yoruba. So I never had any problem with that.
However, the children, particularly the boy, were another thing entirely. They were speaking from their noses. Maybe it was a cockney accent, I wouldn’t know.
All I know is that when I got fed up with their colloquies, I asked some other person what they were saying.
If I had my way, it’s mother tongue all the way!
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