Abstract
Questions of language and translation are central to this study.1 Western feminist theorists have underscored the importance of language in the construction of gender. In the English-speaking West, feminists have shown the connections between the male-centeredness of the language and women’s secondary status in their societies.2 Language is a social institution and at the level of the individual affects social behavior. A people’s language reflects their patterns of social interactions, lines of status, interests, and obsessions. That much is apparent in the above epigraph by Austin; if English makes much of gender differences, it is because these are the distinctions that the society found worth drawing. If Yorùbá society did not make gender distinctions and instead made age distinctions, as the Johnson quote suggests it did, then for the Yorùbá, the age distinctions were the ones worth drawing, at least until the British showed up on our doorstep. It is significant that in spite of the fact that Johnson was conscious of Yorùbá non-gender-specificity, his reference to the Yorùbá man in his example, rather than a non-gender-specific Yorùbá person, could be read as the privileging of the male, as in Austin’s usage of the English word “men.” (Feminist linguists have argued convincingly that the so-called generic use of “man” in English is not actually generic but one more way of promoting the male as norm through language.3) The question that this raises is this: In a milieu in which these two interacting languages—Yorùbá and English—articulate different cultural values, how do we distinguish the Yorùbá gender-freeness from the English male-as-norm in the speech and writing of Yorùbá bilinguals?
Our [Yorùbá] translators in their zeal to find a word expressing the English idea of sex rather than age, coined the … words arakonrin, i.e., the male relative; arabinrin, the female relative; these words have always to be explained to the pure but illiterate Yorùbá man.
—Samuel Johnson, The History of the Yorùbás
Our [i.e., English] common stock of words embodies all distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connections they have found worth marking, in the lifetimes of many generations.
—John Langshaw Austin, Philosophical Papers
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Notes
Deborah Cameron, “Why Is Language a Feminist Issue?” introduction to The Feminist Critique of Language (New York: Routledge, 1990);
Judith Orasanu, Mariam K. Slater, and Leonore Loeb Adler, Language, Sex and Gender (New York: The New York Academy of Sciences, 1979);
Barrie Thorne, Cheris Kramarae, and Nancy Henley, eds., Language, Gender, and Society (Rowley, Mass.: Newbury Press, 1983);
Dale Spender, Man Made Language (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980).
Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 30.
Ayo Bamgbose, A Short Yoruba Grammar (Ibàdàn: Heinemann Educational Books, 1967), 2.
Ayo Bamgbose, The Novels of D. O. Fagunwa (Benin City: Ethiope Publishing, 1974), 61, 63.
Karin Barber, I Could Speak until Tomorrow: Oriki, Women, and the Past in a Yoruba Town (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991).
Bolanle Awe, “Praise Poems as Historical Data: The Example of Yoruba Oriki,” Africa (London) 44, no. 4 (1974): 331–49.
See Adeleke Adeeko, “The Language of Head-calling: A Review Essay on Yoruba Metalanguage,” Research in African Literatures 23, no. 1 (spring 1992): 197–201.
Ulli Beier, Yoruba Poetry: An Anthology of Traditional Poems (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 11.
Adebisi Salami, “Vowel and Consonant Harmony and Vowel Restriction in Assimilated English Loan Words in Yoruba,” in Yoruba Language and Literature, ed. Adebisi Afolayan (Ife: University of Ife Press, 1982).
For an extended discussion of Yorùbá/English borrowings, see Olusola Ajolore, “Lexical Borrowing in Yoruba,” in Yoruba Language and Literature, ed. Adebisi Afolayan (Ife: University of Ife Press, 1982).
Oyekan Owomoyela, A Ki i: Yoruba Proscriptive and Prescriptive Proverbs (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1988), ix.
Olatunde O. Olatunji, “The Yoruba Oral Poet and His Society,” Research in African Literatures 10, no. 2 (fall 1979): 178.
Oludare Olajubu, “Book Reviews,” Research in African Literatures 14, no. 4 (winter 1983): 541.
Isola Akinwumi, “The African Writer’s Tongue,” Research in African Literatures 23, no. 1 (spring 1992): 18.
Olabiyi Yai, “Issues in Oral Poetry: Criticism, Teaching, and Translation,” in Discourse and Its Disguises, ed. Karin Barber and P. F. de Moraes Farias, Birmingham University African Studies Series 1 (Birmingham, England: Centre of West African Studies, 1989), 59.
Deborah Tannen, You Just Don’t Understand (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990).
Joel Sherzer, “A Diversity of Voices: Men’s and Women’s Speech in Ethnographic Perspective,” in Language, Gender, and Sex in Comparative Perspective, ed. Susan Phillips (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 99.
Bade Ajuwon, Funeral Dirges of Yoruba Hunters (New York: Nok Publishers International, 1982);
Wande Abimbola, Ifa: An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus (Ìbàdàn: Oxford University Press, 1976);
Wande Abimbola, Yoruba Oral Tradition (Ìbàdàn: Oxford University Press, 1975);
Adeboye Babalola, Awon Oriki Borokinni (Ìbàdàn: Rosprint Industrial Press Limited, 1981); Oyekan Owomoyela, “Tortoise Tales and Yoruba Ethos,” Research in African Literatures 20, no. 2 (summer 1989);
S. O. Bada, Owe Yoruba Ati Isedale Won (Ibàdàn: University Press Limited, 1970f);
J. O. Ajibola, Owe Yoruba (Ibàdàn: University Press Limited, 1979);
Ulli Beier, Yoruba Myths (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
Oludare Olajubu, “Composition and Performance Technics in Iwi Egungun,” in Yoruba Oral Tradition: Poetry in Music, Dance, and Drama, ed. Wande Abimbola (Ibàdàn: Ibàdàn University Press, 1975), 877.
J. D. Y. Peel, Aladurai A Religious Movement among the Yoruba (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 183.
Maria Black and Rosalind Coward, “Linguistics, Social and Sexual Relations: A Review of Dale Spender’s ‘Man Made Language,’” in The Feminist Critique of Language, ed. Deborah Cameron (New York: Routledge, 1990), 129.
Judith Gleason, Oya: In Praise of an African Goddess (San Francisco: Harper, 1987), 2.
Sue Ellen Charlton, Women in Third World Development (Boulder, Colo.: West-view Press, 1984), 23.
Linda Nicholson, “Interpreting Gender,” in Signs 20, no. 1 (autumn 1994): 103.
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© 2001 Elizabeth A. Castelli
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Oyěwùmí, O. (2001). The Translation of Cultures: Engendering Yorùbá Language, Orature, and World-Sense. In: Castelli, E.A. (eds) Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-04830-1_7
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