₦airaland Forum

ChinenyeN:
See, Odensibiri, if you had shown up earlier, we might not have even had to bother developing names for the elements. Interestingly enough, some of our coined words are strikingly similar. Where I have Ugbam for flourine, you have Ugbasi. We both used indigenous words for coal/charcoal when coining the respective terms for carbon. You certainly put some thought into the names for those elements.

AjaanaOka, certainly I am in agreement that a new term need not be developed for each and every thing. For instance, we already have equivalent expressions for magnet, magnetism, magnetize, magnetic, etc., and we developed them simply by taking advantage of the verb-based nature of the language. This minimizes the number of actual new words we have to coin. Or at least, that's how it seems to us.

Gas - eruku (from -ru [eru] -ku [same ku from ikuku])
Plasma - eruke (from -ru [eru] - ke [spark for the ionization])

Atmosphere - igweikuku [sky + air]
Layer[s] - (possibly consider something from fold)
Exosphere - igweikuku-mkpughe
Thermosphere - igweikuku-oku
Ionosphere - igweikuku-ekeke
Mesosphere - igweikuku-oyi
Stratosphere - igweikuku-mbadamba
Troposphere - igweikuku-ndu

Don't you think that's way too long? I imagine the vast majority of people would rather just say stratosphere, a 3-syllable, 2 morpheme word, rather than "igweikuku-mbadamba", a 10-syllable monstrosity with at least 6 morphemes.

Personally, I very much cherish brevity. You have to keep in mind that most Igbos are bilingual in English to some extent, and almost all educated Igbos to large extent. The temptation to just borrow English words which are often simultaneously more concise as well as precise, is overwhelming. It is a competition for oral space which Igbo is unfortunately losing when it comes to technical vocabulary.

Look at Asian languages for instance, a significant amount of words that are used and adapted today in languages like Korean, Japanese, Bahasa Indonesian, Hindi, Malay, etc are ripped straight from English, with just a mild phonetic change to match the speech patterns of the speaker. For instance in Japanese, Christmas=クリスマス(kurisumasu), similar to how in izugbe government=gọọmentị.

The one major language that stands in contrast this strong global trend of bending to English, is Chinese! There are many cultural, political and orthographic reasons why china is resistant to loaning words directly from English, but one factor that is undeniable is that Chinese morphemes are all typically monosyllabic and compound very simply, allowing you to express foreign concepts very concisely and predictably.

For the -sphere examples that you gave, it seems to me that the obvious solution is to just coin a new term for sphere, which would be immensely useful in abbreviating dozens of potential words, can be compounded like a native word and can give rise to concise ways to say things like "sphere of influence" "political sphere" and "intellectual sphere" in Igbo.

This puritanism in wanting all words to be derived from existing popular words has been tried many places and it often leads to a situation where people just use English (which most Igbo people already do, mind you) to express the idea. This can be seen even in Chinese and french, both are countries in which their governments discourage English words for official use.


I, like you, am really interested in the progression of Igbo but I believe for Igbo to modernize and to be able to express ourselves for any technical or niche concept we will need to coin dozens if not hundreds of new terms, as well as standardize and shorten some words and concepts in contemporary Igbo.

This is nothing unusual as many languages have gone through this process. Even tiny countries like Iceland which is less populous that Ikwerre keep their languages up to date. There are no million dollar contracts being written in Igbo, no binding constitution or legal documents, no LLM thinks in Igbo, even Igbo translation software is classified as "low information"(I emailed Meta about this). This is all very tragic, to rectify this we would need standardisation and institutional power behind it. I think puritanism or "my dialect better pass" are obstacles that need to be dismantled and overcome.

I've been reading some your write-ups ever since I started googling this topic like 2 years ago. I finally decided to comment, I think you should give this a read if you haven't yet, it's by a PhD at the national institute of Nigeria languages, Aba about Igbo technical terms.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339311529_Translating_Technical_Texts_The_Igbo_Language_Example

I also read this your post from 10 years ago in response to scholti . I agree with it to some extent, I think lexical expansion is more important than grammatical change for now, but we have to consider many things if we want the words to stick.

https://www.nairaland.com/2497042/brave-new-world-overhauling-igbo#36971804