Our Language Our Heritage: LETTER TO EBIRA
language is an essential form of communication, and Ebira is a unique language spoken across several states with different variation. However, Ebira Tao is often at core of Ebira languages in general. With the dawn of Computer age, some people in form of conservators had made an attempt to revive Ebira culture, most especially the language itself so that our generation will know how to count in Ebira, they revive those words that had gone into extinction because they want us to speak Ebira and identify with our own. While this is a brilliant idea, It is worthy of note to state that, these self styled cultural conservators should understand the features and intricacies of language in general so as to get their act right.
what we should know is that, there is no single language that is complete. Even the almighty English language borrowed "turban and turbaning ceremony from Arab simply because turban as a word originated from Arab and alien to English culture, English as a universal language had borrowed words from Greek and other languages, words such as socio, logo, psych etc. were all borrowed. However, words borrowed from other languages is often modified to suit the pronunciation of the people borrowing such language. Example of this is that in Yoruba for instance, the word Adura was borrowed from Arabic which is Du'a, but it would be convenient to pronounce it "Adura". Hence, it is obvious that every language has a borrowed word.
One of the essence of borrowed word is to identify that such word spoken is originated from somewhere. E.g the popular "motor" every languages uses is an indication that motor is alien to our indigenous culture and emanated from somewhere.
The problem with the self styled Ebira cultural conservators is that, they fail to realise that words, borrowed into Ebira are meant to remain as it is to foster easy identification and understanding of Ebira language. I have seen a post where many people tries to name an item or word that originally were not known to our forefather. These are words that our forefather had accepted as borrowed words and had changed the pronunciation in a convenient manner. For example, our grand parents will call soldiers, "soja". Every men and women knows what soja is, and what is being referred to as soja. Our fathers knows doctors as "adokita" and vehicles as "moto". This was very simple to understand.
But modern self styled conservators, popularised by Tao FM or emanated by their presenters had started a trend of trying to give a name to all this borrowed word, instead of making language easy, this attempt had often made it cumbersome in most cases. Examples of such is replacing the usual "aameen" with "oose" which was not known 20yrs ago, aduwa or adura as "ipoda" of which "ipoda" doesn't actually interpret "adura" in its entirety. Adura is prayer while ipoda is to plead. They named motor "oturagere" or another name I must have forgotten and many more. Doctor which is Adokita to my grand parents suddenly becomes "omi ozuku enini" i.e people that heal. "Soja" becomes "achaja"
These effort is so much confusing and contradicting that an indigenous Anebira would understand the English version and would struggle to comprehend Ebira version of Tao FM news because of unnecessary renaming of a borrowed word. Which its initial name has been accepted long ago and has come to stay. So it is pathetic when an aged, who doesn't understand English cannot decipher the news read in Ebira because of strange words that was initially not known, or whose borrowed form has been popular and were not used.
The unnecessary renaming of borrowed words into Ebira equally involves numerics. Some self styled conservators had gone all the way to name millions up to quadrillions, when in reality Ebira doesn't have such words and it will be in the interest of effective communication to adopted its borrowed form. Not everyone will ever adjust to the new name, and it doesn't befit any language when anybody can just come up with a name, and expect a whole nation to adjust when they are not an authority in linguistics, formally or traditionally. Even our ancient Traditional musicians credited with the mastery of Ebira language never used such words. For example okevere, samenty, Adeku and Ofelele, all of blessed memory will never use "achaja" for soldiers. And these people are definitely a reference point when you talk about Ebira language.
