What was that?
Ogantable….something that one cannot 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.
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 J.F. Odunjo Alawiye series. In the senior classes, we graduated to the D.O. Fagunwa mystery books.
Just before then, we had started reading the Yoruba Bible. We were reading letters to our grannies, and we were also called upon to write replies.
And, to tell the truth, the replies were hardly easy. The dictators would usually want the letter to personalize them.
‘Greet him o’.
So, how do you write that in a letter? They would ask you to read what you wrote if you told them you’d done the greeting.
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 granduncle returned 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 matter. They spoke from their noses. Maybe it was a cockney accent; I didn’t know then.
All I know is that when I got fed up with their conversations, I asked another person what they were saying.
If I had my way, it would be my mother tongue!
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