₦airaland Forum

Do we have Yorubas here that have thorough understanding of Portuguese, Spanish, German, French?

To connect the dots and rejoin the migration path I believe we need to review materials outside English also. Here is something interesting and shocking.

1. The Biblical name Peter is translated in Yoruba Bible as Peteru. That interpretation is wrong.
The correct translation should have been "Apata".

2. Akoro is a small crown worn by Yoruba regents and is usually less magnificent than a full crown, Ade, that an Oba would wear.

What is amazing is the Yoruba Akoro is called Coronet in English but "Adelskrone" in German.

Where and how did Yoruba words cross connect into Greek/Latin/Roman words?

9jacrip: @ the bolded: that needs to be applied to the works of scholars/promoters of hamitic hypothesis which reeks on this thread. We need to be careful with how we coin terms and parallel Sargon to be Sango, Oduduwa to Dud etc.

You and I are speaking in English to discuss Yoruba roots. Already, we are handicapped by the medium of communication. English language lacks functionality for us to apply sound to customs in Yorubaland.

I read somewhere not long ago the english term "landlord". This is a term we hear and use everyday in Yorubaland. There is no equivalent for landlord in Yoruba tongue. Why is that?

We have to probe Yoruba customs to find answers. The path to the answer is dotted with many other terms and functions each of therm in turn serving as contact points for other traditions. So you go in looking for landlord but come out with landlord, slavery, land cult, sacrifice, exile, and so on and so forth.

So in clarifying Sango, we need to understand what Sango is. There is nothing in Yoruba writing to give us insight of what that term is. Everything on Sango describes who he is. The narration on Sango personality itself places him mythically outside of Yorubaland and was believed to be the reicarnation of a much powerful king before him. So who was this powerful king embodied in Sango?

Can you answer this without going to history to find powerful Sangos before the Yoruba Sango and where, if any, can you find one?

The classification of languages within Africa is very much acceptable given we're looking in ward and there must have been similar vowels, consonant, pronunciation patterns in these languages rather than jumping the Mediterranean to find or coin a similar language. If you do a thorough research you'll find Yoruba narrative of creation of mankind holds in some of these other African cultures/civilizations.

I have no input on that, as long it doesnt stop what we are doing here i dont have a problem with its wide acceptance. Our work here continues regardless.

You seem confused about what Ajami is. Ajami as a word means 'foreign', it didn't even 'tie' West Africa together as you've claimed. It simply was a writing style whereby Arabic alphabets are used for writing African languages. It didn't mean we shared a lingua Franca because the way Ajami would be applied to a Yoruba Language will certainly be far different from how it is applied to Hausa or any other language - besides it is common within Islamic circles. Ajami doesn't in anyway cement Yoruba link to AfroAsia, no Yoruba literature or writings have been done in Ajami even though it was widespread throughout W.Africa - be guided. See: http://www.afrikanistik-online.de/archiv/2010/2957

I have written in Ajami, I read Ajami, so I dont know how i could be confused about its meaning or its application.

There are stacks of Ajami scripts recovered from Timi of Ede's palace and they were state documents, some of which were communications to people outside Yorubaland. There are private Yoruba citizens in posession of family records documented in Ajami.

There were communications between Yoruba, Hausa, Kanuri, Mali, Ghana. What was the linguafranca between these different Empires?

It is good the exercise is religious and race tolerant. From the page one of this post no one has looked at Swahili, Zulu, Wolof et al. Or do we say the contribution of Arab Civilization to mankind in almost all ramifications means we can't look for contributions of other civilizations from within them and we ascribe everything to Arabs?

Arab is younger than Yoruba so take Arab out of the equation.

AfroAsia is not the same as Arab.

Zulu has nothing called Orisa or Edumare or Aramfe. These are the canons of our belief system.

Wolof has no Araba, Adimu, Bilkisu Sungbo.

Swahili has no Ogboni, Isise, Ifa.

All these cultural canons of Yoruba are mirrored one for one in an equivalent value in the AfroAsian culture.

Adimu
Orisa
Aramfe
Isise
Ogboni
Araba
Bilkisu

What use is Niger-Congo grouping, widely accepted or not, when all the belief systems of my land is finding matches in a land far away from Niger- Congo?

9jacrip: My brother, this is quite interesting.
I'd love to see how far these hypothesis goes .

I want to learn.

Yes brother, thank you.

White man says the child born in a black/white relationship is not white, it is black. If you mix a population of these children with that of Morroccans, Egyptians, Jordanians, you cannot tell who is Arab and who is not and you cannot tell who is Northern African and who is not. Physically they have corelating features.
So why is white man now claiming North Africa as a caucasoid heritage when he denies that heritage to the likes of Obama?

My brother when it comes to the blackman, you cannot trust much of what white man classifies, one way or the other. You must look objectively at what the properties and functionalities are.

Yes, it is true Yoruba is classified Niger-Congo. Tell me one member in that group that we share cults and customs with or that we have same tongue with or even share in our narrative of creation of mankind in Ile-Ife. None of them whatsoever.

The classification is political and goes to the heart of missionary works to kill the Sudan footprint across WestAfrica and anchor it elsewhere. It is why all alphabets in WestAfrica are latinized, a move away from the traditional ajami. Ajami was a linguafranca that tied WestAfrica together in a fraternal bond.

I have heard some Yoruba Christians who feel the same way about Ajami and its links to Arab. This prejudice lead some to dismiss the Yoruba link to AfroAsia and they push the Niger-Congo theory repeatedly. This is nothing but fear. I want to remind you that Bible is written in Arabic and there are Christians in Arab lands that say Sallam Alaikum and Allahu Akbar.

This exercise we are on is religious tolerant and race tolerant. For the first time, we want our tongue to lead us to its origin. If the origin end up being Niger-Congo then so be it.

9jacrip,

Who is Agboniregun?

Where did the word Aborigene creep into whiteman's vocabulary? Do you notice a similarity between Agboniregun and Aborigene?


What is Ase?

Where did white man start to associate Sango's rod as an Axe?


What is Orisa?

Where did white man get the word Oracle? Orisa > Orica > Oracle


What is Iduro?
Where did white man get the word Endure?

What is Ehin?
Where did white man get the word Behind?

These and many more questions we are asking and we are inspecting it from the functionality of these words and their applications in our cults, arts, rites, customs, and so on. We agreed not to limit or lead or prejudge but to allow the evidence to lead where it wants.

So far the evidence has been taking a journey and thebtrip has consistently led to AfroAsia. We dont know what we will find when we start to probe our landing there. Is that the origin of Yoruba or is AfroAsia itself a mid-way along a much broader exploratory journey. We dont know but we are keeping an open mind.

Do not be antagonistic here, present your evidence as much as you can by focusing less on language classification and more on language application to the challenges of society in Yoruba antiquity.

To give you the bottom line of our exercise is, we are not searching for who Sango is (we know him already) but we want to know what Sango is (is it a name or title and what is the application).

Tony Spike: The Yoruba language is classified as one of the Niger-Congo languages. As a matter-of-fact, the Niger-Congo languages seem a much more recent version, an evolved form of an ancient type of Nilo-Saharan language. The Oyinbo people who did this classification based their tools on language syntax i.e. the arrangement of Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) in a sentence. However, this is a more generic classification for simplistic study only. The indepth truth is that semantics and etymology are better tools at analysing and understanding a language better. This is what makes the Yoruba language very unique.

You see, these oyinbos have perfected a way of teaching us our history and at the same time, limiting us to historical bounds. We have our proverbs, the Ifa corpus and so many hidden codes in our culture and city names that can give us a far greater perspective. I dare say you don't have to be a practising linguist or historian to put all these pieces together. Where were the Yoruba historians and linguists for the past 50 yrs? What have they been doing in our Universities? Have they been sleeping or what? @ 9jacrip, If you are one of them, it's high time you became radical. It takes a radical mind to make a breakthrough in any field of research. Being conventional will not take you anywhere...

Recently, I found out a research that proposed that the Biblical patriachs were listed among the Egyptian kingship list. It took someone's ingenuity and patience to synchronise dates, names, events, etymologies, symbols e.t.c. This is what I call being radical.

Tony,
Another dead hit on the nail! i love this response.

9jacrip: The bolded part is quite fraudulent and unacceptable! Yoruba language and Hebrew/Middle eastern languages are not even grouped together under linguistic classification.

Match your points/facts within sir, looking inside out is far fetched.

Let's not derail the thread sha, I hope it grows.

Who grouped them?

9jacrip: Nice!
Please provide a link for the bolded.

The rest of your posts are problems you and I are supposed to find solutions to w/out 'famzing' Israelites who will deny ever having connection with us at the slightest opportunity.

Don't get me wrong, this is a beautiful thread. My take is, it will go a long way if we restrict our research to Southwest/Nigeria/West Africa and at max Africa than attach to anything outside, Please understand me.

This exercise, at least from what I have so far seen, is ethnic driven and we are looking from inside out. We are inspecting sounds, letters, root words, names, titles, and so on from the perspective of Yoruba tongue and DNAing them to the general population of tongues in the human race and timeline.

So far there are matches and consistently those matches are footprinted in AfroAsian customs and timeline.

We are not using AfroAsia to explain Yoruba but on the other hand bits and pieces, in arts, symbols, root words, antiquity, records, place names, titles, are all presenting revealing and hard to dismiss evidences of a common root.

Dont blame what we are doing, tell the inputs to stop corresponding and correlating.

Tony Spike: Dierk Lange's approach has its flaws with some exaggerations. I however think it is a great resource, an eye-opener to the world of Yoruba origin. Lange was able to show that Nineveh or mondiana (not Medina) was the location of the revolt. I personally think this story must have happened between 450 BC and 600 BC.
The evidence of the ancient Yoruba stay at South Sudan (or Nubia) is very evident in our language. Precisely, I want to assume the migrants from near-East and Nineveh stayed around Western Nile in South Sudan. Why am I saying this? A substantial tonal and spelling styles of the Yoruba language is very Nilotic. You'd notice that the Yoruba language and some fewer Nigerian languages have excessive use of O and A starting their names and nouns. This O and A feature, I have found out, is a Nilotic influence as it checks out with other 'out of Western Nile' groups like Luo and perhaps, Luhya in Western Kenya. Now there are some issues on ground:

1. How large was the migrating population from near-East?
2. How long did they sojourn in Upper Egypt or Nubia?
3. How large was the final migrating population from Sudan?
4. What happened to the indigenes they met on ground?

As a scientist, there is a population approach called the Birth-Death analysis. This approach can be applied in language and population studies. If I could find the Yoruba population in say 1600 AD, I could estimate what it was in say 500 BC. This can help me locate the number of migrations into Yorubaland. On this, I want to believe that the remnants of people from the Nok culture were on ground during their arrival. Even art forms from Nok era, to say, about 1000 AD witnessed a quantum leap; this itself is an evidence. Research has shown that Ile-Ife, for example, was inhabited as early as 600 BC. After Negro asserted that Nineveh might have been renamed Ile-Ife (Nine-veh > Lile-ifeh > Ile-Ife), it dawned on me that many Yoruba cities/towns were handed codified names by our ancestors.

So finally on what I believe is our origin, the Oduduwa story is a code because the names of the protagonists and locations are basically codified. Most Yoruba myths are codified, alongside the religious customs. That's why we are discussing our ideas and discoveries on a platform like Nairaland. I believe a combination of religious, cultural and scientific methodology, like we are all applying, will reveal a lot of these codes to us. Thanks

Hello man,

You are hitting the nails where they need to be struck and i hope your blows can drive it in deep enough.

Consider the following additions:

1. Could Mondiana be Midian?

2. Is SARGON a name or a title?

3. Could there have been a SARGON pre-migration from Nineveh and another SARGON in the post- migration era of newly settled Ile- Ife?

4. Sargon and Ile Ife, are these imported names?

5. What, if any, are the correlations between
a. Osangangan - 2nd Ooni
b. Sango - 2nd Alaafin
c. Sargon.

prexios: Well i have my weakness anyway, and that also is my strength in this respect, maybe i took it personal. but men, i am not esoteric and i wont be. I am a messenger, I think it is easy to kill the messenger, his message will get him killed first.

If God had wanted a temperament that delves in esoteric to handle this aspect of Yoruba, he would have countless candidates. He that God want God chooses. "eni olorun fe lolorun yan". We all have our gifts and this is how i function and will rightly encourage my audience. i preach what i practice.

Pardon me if i embarrass you or something, its not out of outright indignation, but it is my leadership responsibility as a host on this thread. i have to protect it from being hijacked by free radicals with overt intentions.

Lol.

amor4ce: i think it is best to start from here as a sort of nairaland collaborative project with the aim of producing an encyclopaedic dictionary of yoruba monosyllables and associated vowel prefixes aka stabilizers . i have been wondering if there is any such book with which i could learn the language better. from there the deep aspects of the monosyllables will be revealed to the learner as the oluwa deems fit and ready.

I agree.

Can we take this discussions offline? Does anyone disagree?

prexios: Well i know as the source of this thought or idea, this might be very easy and the result spontaneous for you. But what do you think could be the repercussion for someone less virtuous in this esoteric respect that might get hook to this imagination from the face value of it? You don't know. It is the same beloved illumination that destroy the ant.


If i must do what you told me, i will end up with Eckankar or something else. "he that love gold will not be satisfied with gold" i will start looking for "what i don't know, and what i don't know will know me, yet in time, i wont know anything anymore, even what i know will be taken away from me" i will start well and end in the well. i will be deluded. i know my frame, i know what i am doing.

While i do not believe in esoteric secrets other than open secrets such as readily available Odu-ifa, oriki and insight from peoples names, I do go a long way to exercise care and patience for the sake of other individuals that may not be presently as deep in interpreting oral tradition as i am.

My talent that i have engaged this far is "discerning spirit" or "gift of word interpretations". i engage Yoruba and English vocabularies, and it worked. if it worked for me, it can work for anyone that can exercise patience. genius is eternal patience. wanting it now from supernatural is engaging the wrong formula. i don't like short cut, ready made answers from any source. it is escapology.

My dept of tradition is not because i am an occultist. I AM NOT. my angle is historical on Yoruba oral traditions. Yoruba traditions are not occultist traditions, but it may have been hijacked by practices that points to occult. the practitioners are Yoruba anyway. i am a bona fide traditional scholar born, i am from the house that should be interested in Yoruba tradition.

I wont go esoteric to get information, i will sleep and wake up fresh sometimes and my mind will just remember a Yoruba word, then i will interpret it in ENGLISH. once i am convince i have entertain all possible shades of such words without bias to any shade, i assume it as fact.


Yes, it may be bias writing Yoruba history with a long pole, out of tradition. But it is as bias as this writing Yoruba history as vanguard of the occult. Esoteric? No. If you ponder deep enough, you will find all you need with your God given angel.

Do not end in secret society because of your talent, whereby you will have to nurse conscientious issues and justify that as having power. i don't want strange power. my life is precious enough to me and am grateful to The Giver, i want to use my life to add light to dark areas, not to take children of God into the dark and keep them there as undercover priest.

I am not going to lead anyone astray.

Jeremiah 15:19 NLT

New Living Translation

The LORD replied, "If you return to me, I will restore you so you can continue to serve me. If you speak words that are worthy, you will be my spokesman. You are to influence them; do not let them influence you!

Hey brother, i hear you. That reaponse was not meant to instruct, it is not a script for anyone to practice. However, if anyone would have the audacity to make attempt, the seeds needed to invoke the elements are missing and very unlikely anyone could obtain them who does not have the knowledge. This was meant to be a sneakpeek along the line of discussion into the mysteries of the sounds, words and root letters under discussiin, nothing more.

Given what im reading from you, in consideration of your depth and insight of Yoruba knowledge, im shocked to hear you say Yoruba is not esoteric. Whatt!!!

Even Old testament is filled with esoterism, and no doubt many of what we are discussing have their roots there.

Please do not take responses personal, we are all sharing.

None of the Ado townships in Yorubaland is located arbitrarily and without forethought, thrre is a commonality. What is their commonality?

Yes, i replied to you brother.

amor4ce: What careers were awa omo oodua into prior to colonization? Oyinbo economies and associated jobs which we have been schizophrenically copying have been collapsing. Many of us are sick of oyinbo/corporate jobs and would like to engage in something traditional (natural and peaceful) part-time and full-time. How can an interested individual start / make the transition? How did our forefathers do it and flourish to the extent that the condescending oyinbo explorers could not deny our prosperity? If you are engaged in such or transiting already kindly share your experience as well.

Very good initiative.

Mankind must live and subsist on what the land produces.

Farming
Hunting
Trapping
Fishing
Mining
Herding

Personally i would love farming.

Thank you guys for your responses.

I have a picture in my mind, of a matrix! This matrix can feature in the following formats:
-------------------------------
A
---
1. Audible sound, as in "ra"
2. Inaudible sound, as in "r"

Where "r" is infinitely undefined, emanating as an energy and having the defined properties of "ra", "re", "ri", "ro", "ru", and their higher attachments, ati bebe lo...
--------------------------------
B
---
1. Visible light, as in "yi"
2. Invisible light, as in "y"

Its properties will be "ya", "ye", "yi", "yo", "yu", ati bebe lo...
--------------------------------

Imagine that these properties can be calibrated.

Therefore, the effect of facing Eastward and chanting ya, ya, ya....a thousand times produces a particular spectrum of visible light.

When you face Westward and chant ya, ya, ya...a thousand times you get a different spectrum.

You can do these for North facing and South facing and tabulate the results.


For sound properties, you stand in a stream, lake, river, sea or even ocean, and chant ra, ra, ra...thousand times.

Build a fire and as it sparks and crackles, chant ra....thousand times.

Sit in the forest or on a mountain and chant ra...thousand times.

Stand in the wind and chant ra...thousand times.

At the end of these practices you would begin to uncover the Yoruba crypt and the esoteric meanings behind words such as Ado, Idu, Edu, Odu, and so on and so forth and the science our ancestors applied in locating cities and shrines on the axis of earth's magnetic lines.

Very deep and insightful contributions. I am loving it.

There is a lot in here to provoke the brain. On the topic of Ado and all its variants, I made an observation. The letter D seem to me, at its minimal, to be an anchor or interface between two forces. Consider the Yoruba root sounds DA, DI, DE, DO, DU. Also AD, ID, ED, OD, UD.

Here D acts as a bridge interfacing the authority of creation with the functional manifest and producing a sense of FOUNDING, ORIGIN, FIRST-TO-BE, SETTLEMENT, ORDER and so on.

Ada
Adi
Ade
Ado
Adu
Ida
Idi
Ide
Ido
Idu
Eda
Edi
Ede
Edo
Edu
Oda
Odi
Ode
Odo
Odu
Uda
Udi
Ude
Udo
Udu.