Associate Professor / Reader
Foreign Languages
At the Foreign Languages department office
Appointment on Visitation important
Topic: As Crenças E Os Deuses Dos Iorubanos
Description: A translation from Yoruba to Portuguese of the book ´Àsà ati Òrìsà Yoruba`. This is an attempt to bring the knowledge of the Yoruba culture to the average scholar in Brazil where the Yoruba culture and history form part of the Brazilian traditional religion and beliefs.
# | Certificate | School | Year |
---|---|---|---|
1. | Post-Graduate Diploma (Translation) | Departamento de Tradução, Faculdade de Letras, Universidade de São Paulo (USP), São Paulo, Brazil | 2003 |
“The contact of Yoruba with European Languages: Glotocide or Language Interdependence”
This research in conjunction with the Centre of African Studies, School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS) London, U.K.) The contact of Yoruba with European languages like English and Portuguese had occurred both here in Nigeria and in the Diaspora. The contact of English with Yoruba in Nigeria for example, apart from structural influence, had resulted into many English words being borrowed into Yoruba language. In most cases, these words undergo the Yoruba morphological and phonological transformation that some of them may only be recognised by linguists as borrowed words. E.g.:Póùn - pound,sisì-six penceKobò-copper (one penny)títì-streetNáyín-nine penceeépìnnì-halfpenny (pronounced in English as /”heipni/.The contact of Yoruba with Portuguese in Brazil resulted in heavy morphosyntactical, phonological and lexical influences of the latter on the former. The lexical and phonological influences are the most apparent. For example, acaraje `bean cake` in Brazilian Yoruba is from the word àkàrà in Yoruba of the same meaning. Phenomenon like nasalization, epenthesis, metathesis, apocope, syncope, etc are common features. The influence of Portuguese on Yoruba is such that its impact could lead to what linguists call “language death”. The questions, then, are: How? Is this a real or distant possibility?
AJAYI TAYO is a Associate Professor / Reader at the Department of Foreign Languages
AJAYI has a Post-Graduate Diploma in Translation from Departamento de Tradução, Faculdade de Letras, Universidade de São Paulo (USP), São Paulo, Brazil