₦airaland Forum

AsomughaChuks05:
As the Anambra election approaches, I believe that ANSAA the advertising authority in the state needs to clamp down on the indiscriminate erection of billboards and wall bills. A lot of aspirants who have no realistic chance of emerging as their party's flagbearer are already littering the state with wall bills. These wall bills are an environmental pollution and offenders need to be prosecuted.

Blue3k:
I assumed it had to be by land that bordered the Sea.

Ikwerelastborn:
You're still wrong,ppl with boundaries will tend to have more common origin. I'm sure if you check their origin they have a common ancestor. Like I said before your classification is too simplistic

Ikwerelastborn:
Nop,you can't put Afikpo under 2,Afikpo isn't wawa and far different from the 4 and 5.infact I'm ikwerre and the Afikpo people in ph I tend to meet speak something more similar to ikwerre,Remember Afikpo was part of Abia and have language similarities with ohafia , Aro and Bende and greets Jokwa with Bende so connect it

Ikwerelastborn:
Chinenye.N the guy is deceived by the simple division of Nigeria into states and not understanding the fact that some groups that are more related are cut into different states
E.g
Ihiala in anambra has almost same with orlu in IMO
Oyigbo in Rivers and Ukwa ppl in Abia
Ikerre and IMO
Afikpo in Ebonyi and Ohafia, Arochukwu and Bende in Abia

The op lacks knowledge about igbo dialects and only looks at it from state angle which is too simplistic and wrong funny enough SlayerForever doesn't want to learn

Afriifa:
You can't stay in your region and know what is best for us. stupid mafia! how dare you insult two illustrious sons of Delta state? If you're misinformed about their acts. that's your problem. mind your stupid business. fool! ooh. I can risk getting blocked for 100 years.

ChinenyeN:
Perhaps you misunderstand me. Well, now that I’ve provided all the context beforehand, let me restate my words in a more blunt and concise manner.

The idea that speakers of a language are genetically related to the earliest speakers is not a guarantee we can make.

The idea of a “super dialect” (proto language) is also a hypothesis that we generally cannot prove. So “super dialects” become reconciliatory tools (i.e. used to construct language family trees). In other words, the idea of a “super dialect” is not a guarantee that we can make.

Your approach has similar foundational markers as the current orthodox teachings of the Igbo academia, which do not hold up to scrutiny; fundamental pitfalls, I call them. It will ultimately force one to take a different approach in their considerations.

So with all that said, I was never making arguments to convince you to drop your approach. Instead, I wanted to understand why, despite all the pitfalls, you choose to stick to your guns. In a way we’ve come full circle, because I still hope for my original request to be answered.

If you’ve got any novel information or considerations that informed your attempt to group the various lects, feel free to share it.

In other words, what realizations did you come across? What insights do you have? What is it that truly informed your opinion so much so that you would want to take this approach and stick to the list of only three grouping despite all the pitfall and I had mentioned? That is ultimately what I’m interested in and all my words were to prompt you to share what you might have realized or seen that others (like the Igbo academia) might have missed. Because I would definitely like to know.

However, it’s also understandable if this is just the beginning of your working theory, or a hunch. Often times, we start off with hunches. If you’re still at the “this is a hunch” phase and need to take time to flesh out your working theory so that you can comfortably explain it to others, then no problem. That’s normal, and I’m content to wait and see where your current line of thought takes you in the future.

ChinenyeN:
This would have to be one point where we may just not agree. There are definitely levels to this and all we really do is paint a “general idea” at each level. Still, the potential to dive deeper, decompose the context and build an interpretation is worth the pursuit of “specifics”, even if speculative or hypothetical.

You don’t need to think hard or look far to gain a sense of this. Languages move due to various factors like cultural influence, diffusion, politics, etc. With these many factors the map of “speakers” of a given language can quickly become different from the map of said language’s earliest speakers. English is an excellent example of this. Despite the fact that westerners do not notably inhabit countries like Nigeria, these countries speak English. These countries invariably represent surviving speakers not related to the earliest speakers of English (excluding the fact that we are all human). As such, the language has a different spatial distribution from that of its earliest speakers.

Now, let me provide you with a hypothetical. Say that the population that represents English’s earliest speakers are wiped out by say nuclear winter. This isn’t that far fetched. The US and other world powers have been at the brink of such a reality at least once. It is easy to imagine a scenario in which it was never abated. In such a case, the surviving speakers of English end up being those communities/countries to which English had been spread. And just like that, there are no surviving speakers that are related to the earliest speakers of English (as this population is wiped out).

Now scale this down to hunter-gatherer populations that represented the societal structure of much of humanity for millennia. It is easy to wipe out a hunter-gatherer society. They can make the wrong move and end up in natural life-threatening situations of their own. They can be hunted and exterminated by another unrelated hunter-gatherer population. They could also be disadvantaged in the sense that they do not procreate quickly enough and their population declines until the last surviving member dies. None of this is hypothetical. We know this happened to these populations rather often. With this context established, it is easy to see how language can spread from one hunter-gatherer group to another for various reasons (contact, internal/external politics etc). It is also easy to imagine the society that initially spread it gets wiped out. The language itself can continue to spread (and innovate), but by that time, the surviving speakers do not represent the language’s earliest speakers.

This is why I say that the further back in time we go, the more we lose any sort of guarantee that modern, surviving speakers are the same population as the language’s proto speakers. It simply is not a guarantee that we can make, no matter how we look at it. This is why I believe the approach by the Igbo academia has a fundamental pitfall.

Only in instances where we can guarantee isolation and language innovation can we truly consider the possibility of surviving speakers being related to the earliest speakers.

This is also why I hold the view that the idea of “proto-language” is reconciliatory. It’s is unlikely that there existed a group that spoke that reconstruction. Instead, it is more like an approximation used to reconcile the surviving lects of a given language.

Long story short, a very general broad strokes list of three groupings based off non-guaranteed ancestral relationship (which may or may not match the language history of the area), is simply the same sort of pitfall that the academia has been holding on to for decades now. It is really hard to support such a theory without ignoring various lects and communities (which is exactly what the academia has done for decades). Lastly, a grouping of three is just not representative of the dynamics in the region. So those questions you claimed you were seeking answers to will likely not get answered with your current approach. You will have no choice but to dive deeper, become more granular and eventually add more to your list of dialect groupings.

ChinenyeN:
That said, I believe your hypothesis is too “neat”, and if there is one thing about human history, it is far from neat. From my point of view, your hypothesis falls into the same sort of pitfall that the Igbo academia (linguists and historians, specifically) fell into; the assumption that we are working with a large “meta-language” whose speakers were all neatly related.

I believe this assumption is likely due to the fact that some people still heavily associate the movement of language with the speakers of said language. However, how language diffuses and how populations move are not always the same. In fact, the farther back in time we go, the more we lose any sort of guarantee that the surviving speakers of a given language are in any way related to the speakers of the “proto language” (super dialect, if I could borrow your words).

On top of that, the farther back in time we go, the more likely that the idea of a “proto language” (super dialect) is simply nothing more than an assumption we make to reconcile linguistic branching.

Ekealterego:
Koell`s Polyglata Africana in the 1840s or 50s formed the foundations of the language and dialect groupings in West Africa. I believe he had the following specimens according to him and grouped the lects thus:

ThumbzTNA:
Bella Shmurda ft Sunday Igboho - Cash App rmx

ThumbzTNA:
The struggle for Oduduwa Republic should be named premature ejaculation because it came and went quickly.

pryme:
Quiet people use actions to say what they mean, and their actions are often the loudest cos it comes full of surprises.

ChinenyeN:
So what is the ancestry you hypothesized then?

ChinenyeN:
I see. Now I am understanding your three-group listing better (or at least, I believe I am better understanding what has informed it). This is obviously a loaded question, but I don’t mind diving into it with you. So let’s start with what we see.

You’ve presented a list of three categories that you believe characterizes all surviving lects. You’ve also just recently shared that you are looking beyond lexicology in building this list. Now, do you mind sharing some specifics on the things beyond lexicology that informed your listing?

ChinenyeN:
SlayerForever, Nairaland may not be the right place for you then. Granted, there are still a handful of us here that actively engage in the sort of topic you are referring to. If you search for AjaanaOka and my own handle (ChinenyeN) on Nairaland, you should be able to find a number of threads where we discuss many different topics within this same domain that you are talking about. Most people, however, do not touch this sort of topic, but I believe many of them are interested. They just don’t know how they can contribute to it, so they will more eagerly follow threads where others are discussing things.

SenecaTheYonger:
When I removed my penis, I got a quick glimpse of the cervix, not for too long. I was actually depressed because my mind was just thinking that a much better man (big dick) must have done this to her but it would have been such ruthless fvcking maybe a few days or hours before we met.