Of The Twi Alphabet and the letter C: A Rejoinder-gctid27309

[Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé]

Twi Alphabet vowels and consonants + examples - PDF document

http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/attachments/akan-twi-language-resources/554-twi-alphabet-letter-c-rejoinder-twialphabet.pdf


Of The Twi Alphabet and the letter C: A Rejoinder
by
Mr Tawiah



That we have failed to develop a national language, or given sufficient indication that we need one, gives most Ghanaians only a good reason to make some conjectures. The language of the Akan people, Twi, has become the 'national lingua franca' perhaps, because of the concentration of commercial activity and white collar employment in the south. Except in cases where interlocutors want to express their identity through another ethnic tongue, Twi appears to be the usual mode of communication for most Ghanaians.

The absence of a national language has catapulted the English language unto heights of importance necessary for an official language. This trend has consequently diminished the premium we put on our supposed national language-Twi. It is therefore not unexpected that we have had to borrow from foreign languages to express our thoughts.

I had never noticed the intrusion of the 'foreign letter' C in some of our Ghanaian names, until Seth Nketiah recently raised the issue and questioned Ghanaweb readers whether our Twi alphabet is up to standard. So Acheampong, instead of Akyeampong and Quesi instead of Kwesi, have become fashionable. The people of Techiman have probably never realised that the letter C in the noun is an importation. Kwadwo has also found an anglicised manifestation in Kojo. Do we have letters Q and J in the Twi alphabet? By the way, what is the Twi word for letter? Remember that the word alphabet is not Twi either.

The Twi alphabet has 21 letters and English has 26. I feel ashamed that I struggled to remember all the 21 letters of the alphabet of my mother tongue, but had no problems with the English's. It is even more shameful that I would not be able to write this article in Twi with the same proficiency level, as I would English. The irony however, is that, the native English would never expect a non-English, and indeed the black man, to speak the English language better than him, or just as well as he would. Language is part of our cultural expression; every culture is adequate for the language it expresses. Twi expresses the Ghanaian culture better than any friendly foreign tongue.

However, we have succeeded in superimposing a foreign mode on our Ghanaian tongue, and ended up becoming less proficient in our own language. For instance, when it is raining, we are all used to saying: 'nsuo reto'. Judging from the semantics and the pragmatics of the language, this is not quite right. Nsuo denotes water, Asuo is river and Osuo is rain. From the perspective of register, when we say Nsuo reto, we mean to say something like: 'the water is raining', or 'it is watering'. What we mean to say in fact is: 'Osuo reto', and the rain will fall. We are not talking water 'nsuo', not yet.

But when osuo falls into big drums 'ankore', as we do in our villages, we are interested in collecting nsuo for bathing and cooking. Interestingly, nsuo can be collected and concentrated at a waterlogged location, or a natural water source could be identified and preserved. In this case, we are talking about Asuo, as in Asuo Firaw and Asuo Tano.

The 60 year old who taught me this had learnt it from a white man-Kwasi Broni- couple of decades ago at the Institute of Kmtyw Studies, University of Ghana. It is an insult to our very identity as Ghanaians, and to the spirit of our local languages that the first group of people who taught Twi at the Institute of Kmtyw studies (I stand for correction), were whites. Of course, this development may have its antecedents in our colonial hegemony, but it should communicate to us why some sacred aspects of our traditions have been eloquently expressed and popularised by westerners, perhaps better than by ourselves.

Confront a full-blooded Akan-born and compound-house-bred man in the only street in Tweapease, near Asuom in the eastern region, and ask him to explain 'Kame to mpa so' in Twi. Chances are that, he would fill the air with pornographic images, or push you onto a bed, if there is one nearby, and lie on top of you, for demonstration. But 'Kame to mpa so' is a light food you would normally take before going to bed. It puts you to sleep.

British newspapers and the BBC know the causes of the Rwandan genocide or the Dafur clashes better than Ghanaians. Kmt is too far from the Middle East, so we can understand why we would not be able to tell the Iraq story better than the BBC. But we are closer to Sudan more than the BBC or the Times (UK). See what I mean?

In his article, Nketiah wondered why the Ghana Institute of Languages has not done well to endorse or kick against certain linguistic behaviours. The French has an academy that every year assesses new words and expressions that have 'smuggled' their way into their lexicon of public discourse. It issues statements about such developments.

Following the recent demotion of Pluto, one of the nine planets, some English speakers in America and Britain have started using the word 'Pluto' in conversations, to mean debased, thought less of or demoted. So that, you are 'plutoed' these days means: You are demoted. Similarly, why have you 'plutoed' me, will mean to ask: Why do you think less of me? It is heart-warming that many British newspapers devoted a space for this new word. It was also on the internet. When was the last time the GIL did a thing like this?

When Dr Spooner, a British, mistakenly jumbled words together and ended up mispronouncing for example, 'bikisle' for bicycle, lexicographers quickly took notice and coined the word 'spoonerism', which has remained in all English dictionaries to date. If we had had this development in Ghana, it would have gone unnoticed, whereupon a fine word like spoonerism would have found its way into the jungle for good.

The trouble is, even if the GIL was proactive enough, they would only publish their findings in academic journals, and they will go to the jungle all the same. How many of us have seen a Twi dictionary before? We are happy to keep updated versions of the Oxford and the Penguin dictionaries. Some of us carry the electronic versions around.

But who wants to expend energy studying a language whose alphabet appears inadequate? Whenever a white person mispronounces 'Tawi' or 'Tawa' for my very Ghanaian name Tawiah, I look at him 'from the corner of my eye'-(anikankye), to express my disapproval. But I would often reply a sarcastic yes, because I assume he shouldn't bother to know. So I also pardon my supervisor at work, a Scottish, who asked me whether my mother, Yaa Yeboah is a sister to Tony Yeboah, the Ghanaian international footballer who played for Leeds United. Is every Blair in Britain a relation of the British PM, Tony Blair? Why do some people think like pregnant cockroaches?

These things happen because we have done very well to wipe our Ghanaian tongues clean of our local languages, in our quest for proficiency in the English language. Sadly, we have succeeded in losing both in the process. A Financial Times columnist-David Pilling, noted in the paper's issue of August 26, 2006: "It is also legitimate to ask why anyone should feel obliged to speak English at all. Why should the people of a nation steeped in a rich culture and speaking the most subtle of languages be judged by their ability to converse in guttural tones that took root in a cold, dank island half way around the globe? Yet judged, of course, they are."

All the same, I am happy that the name 'Nketiah' is not spelt 'Ncetiah'. I hope Seth should be pleased that his father resisted the letter C and maintained his original K.
                            Attached files  TwiAlphabet.pdf (190.8 KB)

[Mageba]

Ngiya kolwa abaphansi, Ngiya kolwa kubo okhokho, bona abasiletha khulu mhlaba.

I believe in the ancestors (those who gone below) I believe in them the ancestors, they have given us this great land.

This type of debate among the intellectuals in all the former colonies except Tanganyika-*Nguja that I know of, where KiSwahili is the official language. In *Rhodes land they have decreed 11 official languages that include English and *Dutch. In the infinite wisdom of the compromisers of independence, the so-called leaders have accepted the penalty for the prize. The English and Dutch colonized and brutalized our people to a degree that would make the Klan frown. The spell of Christianity/Euro-Centrism is so strong that you find very few people willing to even question the use of these foreign languages among the indigenous. Even the accepted designation for the nation is nothing but a direction. The positive changes will occur in Izwe lethu (which was chanted by the people at Sharpeville) when the youth of today take power. When there is real change all things will fall into place.

*Nguja the indigenous name of aAmw occupied island of Zanzibar (Zanjibar). This is the root word of Azania, a Latinized form of the aAmwic for the east coast Bantu people. Which is an insult?

RhodesLand should be the official government name since they have legitimatized the colonial languages. By the way they have added the name Mandela to the Rhodes scholarship.
Izwe lethu were the last words uttered before the massacre in Sharpeville.

[Load]

I need to learn Twi. I think I came to the right place.

[Agya Yaw]

Quoting this because it's a good read and to bring it to the fore again.
:gyenyame:

Obadele Kambon;27309 wrote:
Twi Alphabet vowels and consonants + examples - PDF document

http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/attachments/akan-twi-language-resources/554-twi-alphabet-letter-c-rejoinder-twialphabet.pdf

Of The Twi Alphabet and the letter C: A Rejoinder
by
Mr Tawiah

That we have failed to develop a national language, or given sufficient indication that we need one, gives most Ghanaians only a good reason to make some conjectures. The language of the Akan people, Twi, has become the 'national lingua franca' perhaps, because of the concentration of commercial activity and white collar employment in the south. Except in cases where interlocutors want to express their identity through another ethnic tongue, Twi appears to be the usual mode of communication for most Ghanaians.
 
The absence of a national language has catapulted the English language unto heights of importance necessary for an official language. This trend has consequently diminished the premium we put on our supposed national language-Twi. It is therefore not unexpected that we have had to borrow from foreign languages to express our thoughts.
 
I had never noticed the intrusion of the 'foreign letter' C in some of our Ghanaian names, until Seth Nketiah recently raised the issue and questioned Ghanaweb readers whether our Twi alphabet is up to standard. So Acheampong, instead of Akyeampong and Quesi instead of Kwesi, have become fashionable. The people of Techiman have probably never realised that the letter C in the noun is an importation. Kwadwo has also found an anglicised manifestation in Kojo. Do we have letters Q and J in the Twi alphabet? By the way, what is the Twi word for letter? Remember that the word alphabet is not Twi either.
 
The Twi alphabet has 21 letters and English has 26. I feel ashamed that I struggled to remember all the 21 letters of the alphabet of my mother tongue, but had no problems with the English's. It is even more shameful that I would not be able to write this article in Twi with the same proficiency level, as I would English. The irony however, is that, the native English would never expect a non-English, and indeed the black man, to speak the English language better than him, or just as well as he would. Language is part of our cultural expression; every culture is adequate for the language it expresses. Twi expresses the Ghanaian culture better than any friendly foreign tongue.
 
However, we have succeeded in superimposing a foreign mode on our Ghanaian tongue, and ended up becoming less proficient in our own language. For instance, when it is raining, we are all used to saying: 'nsuo reto'. Judging from the semantics and the pragmatics of the language, this is not quite right. Nsuo denotes water, Asuo is river and Osuo is rain. From the perspective of register, when we say Nsuo reto, we mean to say something like: 'the water is raining', or 'it is watering'. What we mean to say in fact is: 'Osuo reto', and the rain will fall. We are not talking water 'nsuo', not yet.
 
But when osuo falls into big drums 'ankore', as we do in our villages, we are interested in collecting nsuo for bathing and cooking. Interestingly, nsuo can be collected and concentrated at a waterlogged location, or a natural water source could be identified and preserved. In this case, we are talking about Asuo, as in Asuo Firaw and Asuo Tano.
 
The 60 year old who taught me this had learnt it from a white man-Kwasi Broni- couple of decades ago at the Institute of Kmtyw Studies, University of Ghana. It is an insult to our very identity as Ghanaians, and to the spirit of our local languages that the first group of people who taught Twi at the Institute of Kmtyw studies (I stand for correction), were whites. Of course, this development may have its antecedents in our colonial hegemony, but it should communicate to us why some sacred aspects of our traditions have been eloquently expressed and popularised by westerners, perhaps better than by ourselves.
 
Confront a full-blooded Akan-born and compound-house-bred man in the only street in Tweapease, near Asuom in the eastern region, and ask him to explain 'Kame to mpa so' in Twi. Chances are that, he would fill the air with pornographic images, or push you onto a bed, if there is one nearby, and lie on top of you, for demonstration. But 'Kame to mpa so' is a light food you would normally take before going to bed. It puts you to sleep.
 
British newspapers and the BBC know the causes of the Rwandan genocide or the Dafur clashes better than Ghanaians. Kmt is too far from the Middle East, so we can understand why we would not be able to tell the Iraq story better than the BBC. But we are closer to Sudan more than the BBC or the Times (UK). See what I mean?
 
In his article, Nketiah wondered why the Ghana Institute of Languages has not done well to endorse or kick against certain linguistic behaviours. The French has an academy that every year assesses new words and expressions that have 'smuggled' their way into their lexicon of public discourse. It issues statements about such developments.
 
Following the recent demotion of Pluto, one of the nine planets, some English speakers in America and Britain have started using the word 'Pluto' in conversations, to mean debased, thought less of or demoted. So that, you are 'plutoed' these days means: You are demoted. Similarly, why have you 'plutoed' me, will mean to ask: Why do you think less of me? It is heart-warming that many British newspapers devoted a space for this new word. It was also on the internet. When was the last time the GIL did a thing like this?
 
When Dr Spooner, a British, mistakenly jumbled words together and ended up mispronouncing for example, 'bikisle' for bicycle, lexicographers quickly took notice and coined the word 'spoonerism', which has remained in all English dictionaries to date. If we had had this development in Ghana, it would have gone unnoticed, whereupon a fine word like spoonerism would have found its way into the jungle for good.
 
The trouble is, even if the GIL was proactive enough, they would only publish their findings in academic journals, and they will go to the jungle all the same. How many of us have seen a Twi dictionary before? We are happy to keep updated versions of the Oxford and the Penguin dictionaries. Some of us carry the electronic versions around.
 
But who wants to expend energy studying a language whose alphabet appears inadequate? Whenever a white person mispronounces 'Tawi' or 'Tawa' for my very Ghanaian name Tawiah, I look at him 'from the corner of my eye'-(anikankye), to express my disapproval. But I would often reply a sarcastic yes, because I assume he shouldn't bother to know. So I also pardon my supervisor at work, a Scottish, who asked me whether my mother, Yaa Yeboah is a sister to Tony Yeboah, the Ghanaian international footballer who played for Leeds United. Is every Blair in Britain a relation of the British PM, Tony Blair? Why do some people think like pregnant cockroaches?
 
These things happen because we have done very well to wipe our Ghanaian tongues clean of our local languages, in our quest for proficiency in the English language. Sadly, we have succeeded in losing both in the process. A Financial Times columnist-David Pilling, noted in the paper's issue of August 26, 2006: "It is also legitimate to ask why anyone should feel obliged to speak English at all. Why should the people of a nation steeped in a rich culture and speaking the most subtle of languages be judged by their ability to converse in guttural tones that took root in a cold, dank island half way around the globe? Yet judged, of course, they are."
 
All the same, I am happy that the name 'Nketiah' is not spelt 'Ncetiah'. I hope Seth should be pleased that his father resisted the letter C and maintained his original K.

[asarhondo]

Great quote Yaw Asare Aboagye!

I agree with about 75% percent of what the Author wrote. For instances where are the standardized Kmtyw language grammar books? Where are the dictionaries? Why have Kmtyw language institutions (for Twi, Isi-Zulu) not developed their vocabularies? While I have only tried to teach myself Isi-Zulu (I had a book with simple phrases and an audio tape that repeated them), I found it a great challenge to learn the language due to the paucity of grammar books and dictionaries. Also, although much can be learnt by listening to audio tapes, from my experience (I had to learn Swedish to study in Sweden), one actually learns a language more by writing a language. Since native accents take some time to develop.

Furthermore, many languages are filled with "expressions", such as in English "We made a killing", which means we made a lot of money, or Swedish, Jag är flitig som en myra,  which literally means "I am diligent as an ant" or "I am working hard". Indeed many languages have colloquialism that are grammatically incorrect, so I don't see that as uniquely Kmtyw. At the same time, I do find information about what is the basic word order, parts of speech and vocabulary of a specific language lacking. However, I could be wrong. I should also add that all of the Indo-eureurasiaan (German, English, Swedish) and the Romantic languages (French, Italian, Spanish) have had time to establish rules that cut across all their sound (language) systems, which makes them all pretty easy to learn if you follow the rules of grammar: subject, verb and object.    

Nevertheless, if we are Pan-Kmtywist or Kmtyw centered, we will all have to learn an Kmtyw language or two. I encourage people to sign up for the classes offered by Abibitumikasa, they are vital for our re-Kmtywization. Especially those like myself who plan on living in Kmt in the near future. On a side note, I hope the staff of Abibitumikasa can add an Isi-Zulu class since I really would like to learn the language, however, I am not opposed to the idea of learning Twi either.

Lastly, English, that is contemporary american English, is the "Lingua franca" currently spoken across the globe. It is a necessity for the time being to learn it. Lets make the effort as Kmtyws to master it but at the same time change that as well as our current state on the globe.

"Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories"
Amilcar Cabral