If we had
heard it once, we had heard it a hundred times.
“Don’t worry,
Hausa is easy.”
This is the
advice we received before we came to Nigeria.
We’ve since come to realize that this advice was coming from either (a)
people who mastered Hausa decades ago and have since forgotten what it was like
to learn it, (b) people who only rarely use Hausa in their daily lives, or (c) language
geniuses. Hausa is not easy. Hausa is
hard.
Hausa is a
tonal language. Twelve months ago this
would have only vaguely meant anything to me.
I understood tonal language to mean something about the tone of voice
used impacting meaning and thought that it was only in languages like Chinese,
so I should be safe. Wrong.
I have come
to see a tonal language is one where the pitch of the syllable and pitch
changes between syllables mean AT LEAST as much as the actual sounds made in
speaking the words. English has a few
words that have meaning affected by tone, but not many. We do talk about “stress” in English, which
does have some similarity, too. For
example, if you said megaphone as “MEG-a-phone” it would not necessarily be interpreted
the same as “meg-a-PHONE”.
Instead of
stress, think about what pitch you use when talking. In English we use pitch at
times to highlight a word or to make a sentence “flow” better – like raising
the pitch toward a question or the general lowering of pitch toward the end of
a sentence. That happens in Hausa
sentences, but also within each word. An
example from English is the word address.
When you are getting ready to mail something, you write the address
(noun) on it. We say that kind of
address with the “ad” part higher than the “dress” part. If you call out someone’s name to get their
attention, you address (verb) them. We
say that with the “ad” low and the “dress” higher.
In the
example, changing whether your pitch was low-high or high-low changes the
meaning of the word. This is what
happens in Hausa. WITH EVERY WORD. In a two syllable word, low-high, high-low,
low-low, and high-high are all possibly different meanings. Now to make it worse, you could also have a
falling tone (going from high to low in one syllable), or if it is a word with
more than two syllables, you could have high, low and middle tones.
To make this
even more complex, in most tonal languages – including Hausa – the tones are
not written in any form, so like address (the noun) and address (the verb), you
can’t tell just by looking at the word which way to say it. We have had to create our own way of marking
what tone a syllable has, so we can hopefully
reproduce it correctly next time. What’s
more, many people speaking tonal languages don’t realize what they are doing with
the tones, because that’s how they’ve always used the language, and so they
have trouble helping you learn them. We
get laughed at often when using the improper tone, only to have the person
correct us by saying the exact same thing back to us (at least that’s what it
sounds like to us). They may not be able
to explain to you what the tones are doing and how you messed it up, they just
know you did.
So some
examples for you:
mata. Said with “ma” high and “ta” low (hereafter,
high-low, etc), it means wife.
Said high-high, it means wives
(plural). Small difference in sound, BIG
DIFFERENCE IN MEANING!
ina. Said high-low, it means I (am). Said low-high, it means where or how is.
fara.
Said high-low, it means to begin. Said low-high, it means grasshopper. Said high-high, it means anemia.
In our
training we were taught that there was one good thing about tonal
languages. Apparently with all the
differing meanings based on different tonal combinations, tonal languages have
a tendency to use shorter words. Maybe
it is because they cram all their vocabulary into fewer words by modifying
tones, I don’t know, but what ends up happening is each word gets used over and
over, and there are a seemingly endless list of one or two syllable words that
all end in –a.
Take the
Hausa word, da.
Da with a high tone doesn’t exist. This should make it easy, right?
Wrong.
Da with a falling tone means:
1. formerly 2. before 3. just now
4. if, then
Da with a low tone mean: 1. with 2. and 3. by 4. than 5. that, which, who 6. when
7. since 8. there is/there
are 9. at (in reference to time) 10. in the (in reference to time of day)
Just for fun
in class the other day I came up with this sentence.
Ina da ti da zan sha da shi da ta.
(Translates as: I have tea that I
will drink with him and her.)
In it, every da
has a different meaning.
This challenge
may make it fun to create sentences in a Hausa classroom, but it sure makes interpreting
what people are saying as they speak very hard! But, muna kokari (we are trying!)
That reminds me... Kokari is the best I can type it on an English keyboard, but is not actually how it is spelled, since it uses letters that don't exist in English. Maybe next note I will explain the Hausa alphabet...
That reminds me... Kokari is the best I can type it on an English keyboard, but is not actually how it is spelled, since it uses letters that don't exist in English. Maybe next note I will explain the Hausa alphabet...
