Well,as you know from my newsletter, Lord-willing, I’m going to be going to linguistics school next year. My work has already taught me a lot about language and linguisics.
Through African languages, I’ve had introductions to tone, phonetics, grammar, class, morphology, a little semantics. I look for complex patterns in texts to clean or repair them.
In the meantime, I’ve taken time to learn, or more often just learn about, several languages and scripts.
A year in French school of course to get a reasonable level in French. Basic greeings in Swiss german and Italian. I’ve worked with some texts in Arabic script, though Coca Cola is about the only phrase I can reliably recognize at this point. We all play with Cameroonian pidgin when we’re in a goofy mood. I even took some time in Israel to learn to pronounce the Hebrew alphabet.
They recommend that anyone involved with language work try to learn at least one African language. Since I don’t work with a specific language team and I live in the city, I’m taking the opportunity to learn Ewondo. Ewondo is the language of the tribe that inhabits Yaounde, and a local trade language related closely to the other languages of the area.
We’ve gotten through the basic greetings and obligatory questions. “How did you sleep?”, “Where are you going?”, “How is your wife, children, aunt, uncle, chickens..” (They’re always fine at this point in the conversation, but you may find out differently later in the conversation.) We’re getting into some complex expressions, and I’ve not had as much time to study outside of my 3 hours a week in class.
I went downtown to the market yesterday, and for the first time, I understood a large percentage of what was yelled at me in the market, which is at the same time unsettling and amusing. Of course, I’m used to the French and English (A man described my imposing friend as a cartoon character, Obelix, and I got quite a giggle as the man was quite right about the resemblance.) A Cameroonian was talking about a woman mixing French, English, and Beti, and I was able to follow the phrase without problem.
Anyways…this is one more step into Cameroonian culture…stepping out of the “colonial” languages and into something a little more personal. If I could go to the market and function in Ewondo and Fulfulde, in addition to my French and English, I would be able to communicate with virtualy anyone except those in the deepest villages.
