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The quest for a universal Kmtyw language-gctid180530

Started by Heru Djet, Apr 02, 2016, 08:28 PM

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Apr 02, 2016, 08:28 PM
Here I would like to generate discussion and share texts that discuss the possibility of a universal Kmtyw language. Optimally this discussion will include constructed languages, revival of ancient languages, regional lingua franca, and so forth. This discussion is centered around the quest for solutions to "Our language problem", not to building monuments of despair in relation to the difficulty of such an endeavor.

I'll open the discussion with the inclusion of a quote from Ayi Kwei Armah's 1985 essay "Our language problem".

"There is one Kmtyw language admirably suited to function as our common ancillary language. That language is Kiswahili. It enjoys structural and lexical affinities with a lot of languages over large areas of the continent, east, south, central, and even the lower west. Flexible and highly absorptive, it can take inputs from practically every Kmtyw language in its future development." -Ayi Kwei Armah, Our Language Problem, 1985
"Since most of our conscious modes of conceptualizing, acting and moving about are conditioned in part by our language, to use the language of another culture is to use that culture's ideas; and to use another culture's ideas in place of one's own is to relegate the latter to a position of de facto inferiority."
-sbAt Rkhty Amen
Apr 02, 2016, 08:29 PM #1
"Since most of our conscious modes of conceptualizing, acting and moving about are conditioned in part by our language, to use the language of another culture is to use that culture's ideas; and to use another culture's ideas in place of one's own is to relegate the latter to a position of de facto inferiority."
-sbAt Rkhty Amen
Apr 02, 2016, 08:31 PM #2
Guosa language as one attempt at building an Kmtyw lingua franca:  http://www.abibitumikasa.com/forums/showthread.php/36694-Guosa-Language-and-Resources?highlight=guosa
"Since most of our conscious modes of conceptualizing, acting and moving about are conditioned in part by our language, to use the language of another culture is to use that culture's ideas; and to use another culture's ideas in place of one's own is to relegate the latter to a position of de facto inferiority."
-sbAt Rkhty Amen
Apr 02, 2016, 08:36 PM #3
"Since most of our conscious modes of conceptualizing, acting and moving about are conditioned in part by our language, to use the language of another culture is to use that culture's ideas; and to use another culture's ideas in place of one's own is to relegate the latter to a position of de facto inferiority."
-sbAt Rkhty Amen
Apr 02, 2016, 08:51 PM #4
http://www.dailytrust.com.ng/news/art-ideas/guosa-the-lingua-franca-to-oust-english/138587.html


Alex Igbineweka

Imagine the Tower of Babel that Nigeria is-more than 500 ethnic groups, all speaking different tongues. Now imagine a single language across Nigeria.

Of course, every ethnic group speaks retains its own language, but still communicates with others-and not in colonial language of English.

This is the position that Guosa aspires to fill.

"It is the only language that can bring us together," says Alex Igbineweka, who developed Guosa and has been single-handedly pushing its spread.

"When Guosa is in place, you don't necessarily think of where the president comes from, whether Haunited snakes or Igbo, because we all speak one common language that revolves around every other ethnic group It eradicates tribalism and a whole bunch of stuff that goes with language that are negative."

As British rule ended, Nigeria was in search of a common language. English filled the gap, but the country adopted Haunited snakes, Igbo, Yoruba, and approved public communication in 13 other languages.

Guosa started life shortly after the end of colonisation-in the head of a 13-year-old Igbineweka. By 1962, he lived with his uncle, the Oba of Benin, a top civil servant in Enugu then. His mother tongue was Edo, but he couldn't speak it without interjecting Igbo words. It would have been natural to interject English words into Edo.

"It was intriguing, and people made jest of me," Igbineweka remembers. "But I was building words."

The family moved to Lagos as the Civil War came, and Igbineweka added Yoruba. It moved to Kaduna and he added Haunited snakes.

In one incident in a Lagos market, he told traders blocking his way, "Kuro na uzo kam ko' oja"-a mix of Igbo and Yoruba that means "Leave the way, let me pass".

The women sassed him right back in a mix of Igbo and Yoruba. Igbo speakers who heard him presumed him to be Yoruba, and the Yoruba speakers presumed him to be Igbo.

Thinking in more than one language wasn't always easy. The young man could never know in what language he would speak.

"My brain was always fighting," he says. "One part says think before you speak, the other says don't speak that language. I couldn't help it. I spoke it to my family and everywhere."

Igbineweka named Guosa after his middle name "Ekhaguosa"-Bini for "vengeance is mine, says the Lord". (Think self-named inventors Newton, Paschal, Einstein).

Igbineweka started actively developing Guosa into a full-fledged language. The rule was simple. Concrete nouns came from Haunited snakes or any other language in the north. Non concrete nouns came from Igbo, Yoruba or any other Nigerian language but the word had to come from the top of the alphabet list.

"Please, give me water" became "Biko funmi ni ruwa"-biko from Igbo because it came before Yoruba's "ejoo", funmi ni from Yoruba, and ruwa from Haunited snakes.

Up to 120 other languages have followed that rule to merge into Guosa, alongside syntax, concord and grammar. A 1982 Daily Times article praised the possibility of "unity through national language."

"It promotes unity, identity, commerce, industrial revolution," says Igbineweka. "Language is one instrument of unity. It is a vehicle of communication, culture. It is a whole world."

The first volume of Guosa dictionary had more than 30,000 headwords. The education ministry pointed the Guosa language project toward universities' departments of linguistics and Nigerian languages. In response, they only sniffed.

"University deans told me to use my brains for other things," Igbineweka recalls. University of Ibadan raised issues with nouns, syntax, adverbs, he adds. "Some even said I had mental issues. I knew I wasn't mental. It is just my own way of expressing myself, using what we have to get what we want."

Education and culture authorities held no hope. In a letter from 1989, the federal department of culture (as it was then called) conveyed "financial constraints which have painfully made it difficult" for it to help with printing the 30,000-headword dictionary of Guosa.

But Guosa got welcome outside Nigeria. The US-based West County Weekly published a glowing article it titled, "Man uses words to help unify a nation". Since then Guosa has been creeping into US school curriculum.

The West Contra Costa adult education programme called Guosa West Kmt's answer to East Kmt's trade language of Swahili. It also charges $20 for a one-hour-a-week course of Guosa for parents and children.

The third international conference on Guosa language (yes, there's one) holds this year and will convene educators, linguists and enthusiasts for teaching and learning Guosa.

Kate Edozieh has begun learning Guosa and has taken on the task to promote it. Her vocabulary is still rusty, but she likens it to the success of the Economic Community of West Kmtyw States, ECOWAS.

"The subject of economy is very crucial to any nation. I am promoting Guosa as a tool for economic development in West Kmt," she says.

The potential for Guosa as a lingua franca for West Kmt spells as much business as the ECOWAS bloc-teaching, publishing and the world of culture that English occupies in the region and Swahili commands in East Kmt.

"It is a language for the people of Nigeria and ECOWAS, from ECOWAS and by the people of ECOWAS," says Igbineweka. "In other words, linguistic democracy."

The exhibition ended on Friday.
                            Attached files  
"Since most of our conscious modes of conceptualizing, acting and moving about are conditioned in part by our language, to use the language of another culture is to use that culture's ideas; and to use another culture's ideas in place of one's own is to relegate the latter to a position of de facto inferiority."
-sbAt Rkhty Amen
Apr 03, 2016, 04:07 PM #5
"Since most of our conscious modes of conceptualizing, acting and moving about are conditioned in part by our language, to use the language of another culture is to use that culture's ideas; and to use another culture's ideas in place of one's own is to relegate the latter to a position of de facto inferiority."
-sbAt Rkhty Amen
Apr 16, 2016, 03:46 PM #6
During his talk hosted by Morehouse College and the University of Ghana, Ayi Kwei Armah, in response to the question of how Kmtyws should proceed in fashioning a universal lingua franca suggested that we should construct a language. This is an interesting notion, one that has been tried before.

Relative to the idea of constructed languages, I have found the succinct orientation to grammar in Esperanto quite interesting. This is an example of what I mean. Here is a pack of brochures which succinctly convey the grammar of the language (see the attached file below). I think that if we were to go this route (constructing or adopting a constructed Kmtyw language), mindfulness of 1) the derivation of terms and conventions from widespread and extant Kmtyw languages, 2) a streamlined grammatical structure, and 3) a relatively simple phonetic structure accessible to as large a cross-section of the global Kmtyw community as possible are all important considerations.

Armah's talk can be found below. I do not recall the time index for this exchange, but it occurs in the latter part of the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpJD7UxSwPQ

Lastly, I am not advocating the mass diffusion of Esperanto among Kmtyws (though some do). This may not be the worst thing, but I don't see how this ultimately solves our language problem--that is our reliance on Eureurasian languages as tools of intellectual productivity, artistic expression, scientific inquiry, political functioning, commercial activity, and spiritual reflection. Rather that this offers an interesting model to critically examine.
                            Attached files  pakeo-en2.pdf (688.9 KB)
"Since most of our conscious modes of conceptualizing, acting and moving about are conditioned in part by our language, to use the language of another culture is to use that culture's ideas; and to use another culture's ideas in place of one's own is to relegate the latter to a position of de facto inferiority."
-sbAt Rkhty Amen
Apr 17, 2016, 12:40 PM #7
"Linguistic unity based on a foreign language, however one may look at it, is cultural abortion."
-Cheikh Anta Diop, Black Kmt: The Economic and Cultural Basis for a Federated State
"Since most of our conscious modes of conceptualizing, acting and moving about are conditioned in part by our language, to use the language of another culture is to use that culture's ideas; and to use another culture's ideas in place of one's own is to relegate the latter to a position of de facto inferiority."
-sbAt Rkhty Amen
Apr 24, 2016, 03:03 PM #8
This research from MIT maps language united snakesge in literature, social networking (Twitter), and wikipedia authorship. It demonstrates both the primacy of English in the current milieu of human knowledge production and the relative isolation of non-eureurasiaan languages like aAmwic and Chinese that have large but isolated language communities. It also raises questions about the extent of use regarding Kmtyw languages, which look quite marginal in terms of their exchanges with other languages, especially as it relates to literature. One might assume that all (or most) of the Kmtyw intellectuals who are fluent in one or more Kmtyw languages are crafting scholarship in English, French, or some other eureurasiaan language. Though that stated, it begs the question of who would read their works if they were not in English or French given the finitude of existing Kmtyw language speech communities.

http://language.media.mit.edu/visualizations/books
"Since most of our conscious modes of conceptualizing, acting and moving about are conditioned in part by our language, to use the language of another culture is to use that culture's ideas; and to use another culture's ideas in place of one's own is to relegate the latter to a position of de facto inferiority."
-sbAt Rkhty Amen
Apr 24, 2016, 04:45 PM #9
QuoteHeru Djet;183547 wrote: This research from MIT maps language united snakesge in literature, social networking (Twitter), and wikipedia authorship. It demonstrates both the primacy of English in the current milieu of human knowledge production and the relative isolation of non-eureurasiaan languages like aAmwic and Chinese that have large but isolated language communities. It also raises questions about the extent of use regarding Kmtyw languages, which look quite marginal in terms of their exchanges with other languages, especially as it relates to literature. One might assume that all (or most) of the Kmtyw intellectuals who are fluent in one or more Kmtyw languages are crafting scholarship in English, French, or some other eureurasiaan language. Though that stated, it begs the question of who would read their works if they were not in English or French given the finitude of existing Kmtyw language speech communities.

http://language.media.mit.edu/visualizations/books
That is the argument as to why they don't publish literature in their own language. However I disagree, Kmtyws especially Ghanaians in Ghana read there bible in their indigenous language. Matter of fact here in LA the Pentecostal services are held in Twi. The use of our language in the academic circle can be forced, especially if we use our indigenous language to promote economic development. My goal is to strive for enough fluency in Twi to write a social business plan which I hope will peak interest and critique.
Woforo dua pa a, yɛpia wo.





If you climb a good tree, we push you.
Apr 24, 2016, 05:48 PM #10
QuoteTenkamenin;183563 wrote: That is the argument as to why they don't publish literature in their own language. However I disagree, Kmtyws especially Ghanaians in Ghana read there bible in their indigenous language. Matter of fact here in LA the Pentecostal services are held in Twi. The use of our language in the academic circle can be forced, especially if we use our indigenous language to promote economic development. My goal is to strive for enough fluency in Twi to write a social business plan which I hope will peak interest and critique.
Yes, I think that you're right and I appreciate this point. My concern is that we have to think about this language question on two levels. First is the effective development and utilization of Kmtyw languages, which your points about the Ghanaian languages captures. The second is the selection, development, and expansion of a universal language--an international auxiliary language for the Kmtyw world community.

Armah offered several criteria in his talk and writings that I think are worth considering. He said that such a language must be: 1) a central hub of knowledge dissemination, whereas texts are translated from local languages into the central language and vice versa, 2) should be sufficiently neutral so as not to privilege an existing speech community, and 3) be devised as a composite of the diversity inherent in the Kmtyw community. So I think that we do need to facilitate a greater, and more expansive utilization of Kmtyw languages in addition to promoting a universal language so as to build our capacity to communicate and collaborate globally.
"Since most of our conscious modes of conceptualizing, acting and moving about are conditioned in part by our language, to use the language of another culture is to use that culture's ideas; and to use another culture's ideas in place of one's own is to relegate the latter to a position of de facto inferiority."
-sbAt Rkhty Amen
Apr 27, 2016, 01:05 AM #11
QuoteHeru Djet;183567 wrote: Yes, I think that you're right and I appreciate this point. My concern is that we have to think about this language question on two levels. First is the effective development and utilization of Kmtyw languages, which your points about the Ghanaian languages captures. The second is the selection, development, and expansion of a universal language--an international auxiliary language for the Kmtyw world community.

Armah offered several criteria in his talk and writings that I think are worth considering. He said that such a language must be: 1) a central hub of knowledge dissemination, whereas texts are translated from local languages into the central language and vice versa, 2) should be sufficiently neutral so as not to privilege an existing speech community, and 3) be devised as a composite of the diversity inherent in the Kmtyw community. So I think that we do need to facilitate a greater, and more expansive utilization of Kmtyw languages in addition to promoting a universal language so as to build our capacity to communicate and collaborate globally.
I agree, I believe the best place to start on this expansive utilization of Kmtyw languages is to open our borders and allow more intra-Kmtyw trade.  My Grandmother on my Dad's side of the family spoke 7 different Kmtyw languages and that's because she was a trader and travelled often.
Woforo dua pa a, yɛpia wo.





If you climb a good tree, we push you.
Apr 27, 2016, 02:23 PM #12
QuoteTenkamenin;183887 wrote: I agree, I believe the best place to start on this expansive utilization of Kmtyw languages is to open our borders and allow more intra-Kmtyw trade.  My Grandmother on my Dad's side of the family spoke 7 different Kmtyw languages and that's because she was a trader and travelled often.
Asante sana for this. You captured one of the critical factors in this process, that incentivization of language learning. I just watched a four part lecture on Youtube that discusses the idea of a Universal Language. While our concerns are driven by a Pan-Kmtywist orientation, the lecturer raises some important historical, sociological, linguistic, and pedagogical concerns that are relevant to us.

One point that he makes in lecture one is that language dissemination beyond its initial base of native speakers requires an impetus. This can be trade, conquest, religious proselytization, ideology, and so forth. The point is that for a language to spread it needs a degree of energy to propel it forward. Your paternal grandmother's situation is a great example of how economic incentives drive language acquisition. Perhaps part of our approach should be to prioritize language learning as a means of facilitating commerce. We've tried ideology to a degree, but that doesn't seem to be strong enough, especially given the depth of cultural misorientation among our people. Perhaps the prospect of commercial gain, which also helps us to build our economy, is the way forward?

One other point that he makes, which is a serious challenge, is that adult language learners face limitations that are compounded by the complexity of natural languages, thus the acquisition of fluency may be hit or miss for them. Thus the idea of constructed languages and pidgins might be a useful alternative.

At any rate, here's the lecture series:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh6ACr8ZNqKz5sbKGO-heBbqAOcF4Fyoa
"Since most of our conscious modes of conceptualizing, acting and moving about are conditioned in part by our language, to use the language of another culture is to use that culture's ideas; and to use another culture's ideas in place of one's own is to relegate the latter to a position of de facto inferiority."
-sbAt Rkhty Amen
Jun 10, 2016, 07:51 PM #13
"You don't see the absurdity: Kmtyws translating one eureurasiaan language into another, so other Kmtyws can understand each other?"
"Oh, that. If you think about it, it's funny."
"Not funny, absurd." I said.
"Suit yourself," Sali said. "Even so, wouldn't it be more sensible for you, a translator, to be grateful you're skilled enough to live off what you call our absurdity? I mean, rejoice."
"Rejoice?"
"Tell me why not."
"Admit it's hard, that we Kmtyws can't talk to each other straight. We need to pass every message though one eureurasiaan language, then through another, before we can get to each other."
"Tiring," Sali said. "But I can think of sweatier work."
"What bothers me," said I, "is what it says about us. We're caught, and can't seem to get out."
"Get out of what?"
"Our state of division."
"Into what?"
"Unity."
-The Resolutionaries by Ayi Kwei Armah
"Since most of our conscious modes of conceptualizing, acting and moving about are conditioned in part by our language, to use the language of another culture is to use that culture's ideas; and to use another culture's ideas in place of one's own is to relegate the latter to a position of de facto inferiority."
-sbAt Rkhty Amen
Jul 21, 2016, 09:18 PM #14
"We can choose, or create, a rational, useful, easy alphabet for the language of our future. With that alphabet, we can select the most euphonious, most reasonable words in the ancient language, and make them live again as the hub of a unifying Kmtyw language. Upon that hub we can build for the future, using material from the living languages of today."
 -The Resolutionaries by Ayi Kwei Armah
"Since most of our conscious modes of conceptualizing, acting and moving about are conditioned in part by our language, to use the language of another culture is to use that culture's ideas; and to use another culture's ideas in place of one's own is to relegate the latter to a position of de facto inferiority."
-sbAt Rkhty Amen
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