On Tuesday, November 1, 2016, 'O O' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:
Much of Africa burns (economically and culturally), and here we dwell day after day or even week after week on the usage or non-usage of an English word "outrightly".Ken,
You play the Ostrich here. Your man Farooq Kperogi is arrogant, uncouth and self-opinionated. He wants to be the gatekeeper of the English language. An impossible task. He wants to be the sole determinant of what is standard and non standard English. He equates proficiency in English with intelligence and finally he thinks because he knows some arcane rules of English which is of little value to any one else he can denigrate our African mother tongues!
As you can see he is the completely brainwashed African whose mind is thoroughly colonised and you as a colleague owe him a duty to help him find his way down from his flight of fancy.
Nuff said for now.
Cheers.
IBK
Sent from my Windows Phone
From: Kenneth Harrow
Sent: 01/11/2016 05:51
To: usaafricadialogue
Subject: Re: SV: SV: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Farooq, Funmi and YonaDear salimano
Thank you for flattering me, but I don't think flattery will really get you very far here. I do regard Farooq as an authority on English and on language; I didn't see where he claimed any more than that, and the fight over whether a word used in Nigeria can be legitimately considered standard in the u.s. seems like a non-issue. What are we really debating here? The personality of Farooq? I have no desire to judge anyone on this list; not anyone at all, under any conditions.
Whether the u.s. stands above Nigeria in its use of English? What would the point be?
My interest, which I guess no one else takes quite as seriously, is the place of pidgin, and "English" language of sorts, that developed in Nigeria into what seems to me to be an African language. I learned a bit of it in Cameroon; my dear colleague bole butake, who just passed, wrote plays in pidgin; Nigerians of the highest literary merit, like Soyinka and achebe, have turned to it often.
My real advice is for us to move on over the debates w farooq's place or qualifications etc. it won't profit anyone. But if language itself is the issue, then considering the piece in the thread below, which you cite, we could profitably respond to the ngugi-like issue that an African language is the only appropriate vehicle for the expression of African culture because it is grounded in African epistemology and values. My question then is, well, if Swahili—also a creolized language—is African enough to be a national language in east Africa, what of pidgin?
What priorities continue to downvalue it? Should we not be advocating for its just place, culturally and nationally? If not, why not?
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/
people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@
googlegroups.com > on behalf of Salimonu Kadiri <ogunlakaiye@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com >
Date: Monday 31 October 2016 at 18:31
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com >
Subject: SV: SV: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Farooq, Funmi and Yona
Kenneth,
In a brawl between two persons in which you have actively sided with one of the combatants, it sounds to me as an afterthought diplomacy to declare neutrality by mimicking King Lear - Me too, I don't want to jump into a fight! Please make peace, and we can move on... (From Kenneth's post, Sunday, 30 Oct. 2016, time 6:18).
If you have forgotten, I will remind you that at 11:05 on Friday, 28 October 2016, Farooq Kperogi, among other things, wrote thus, "Ask any of your American friends or colleagues if they use "outrightly" as the adverb of "outright." May be we should ask Dr. Harrow, a professor of English and the native speaker of the language, how the word sounds to him." At 1:15 PM on Friday, 28 October 2016, Kenneth Harrow wrote in response to IBK thus, "Dear IBK, Where does Farooq say he is the sole determinant of standard English? Did I miss it?" Later on the same Friday at 19: 05 you, Kenneth Harrow, responded to Farooq's earlier request to you for arbitration on the right use of the word "outrightly" thus, "Dear all, I never heard anyone say outrightly. ....//.... As for Farooq, he is not a gatekeeper." With your response, you actually jumped into the fight over the use of the word of "outrightly," despite the fact that the user of the word referred to the online dictionaries licensed in the US as the authentic source of the word. After jumping into the river, you now say you don't want to be wet!! Common Kenneth, you must finish what you have started. You asked IBK where Farooq claimed to be the sole determinant of standard English and I have provided you with incontrovertible excerpts from Farooq's postings. I have always regarded you as a fair and honest person. It is because of my regard for your fairness and honesty that necessitated my request to you to take a stand, just as you did on the use of the word "outrightly," and tell us if, by virtue of the excerpts from Farooq's postings, he has claimed to be sole determinant of standard English or not. My request is not a challenge to combat with you or anybody hence, you cannot hide under the pretence of not wanting to jump into a fight but to make peace and move on in order to avoid taking a honest and fair stand on Farooq's claim to be the sole determinant of standard English.
I thank Professor Buba for his suggestion which I think is in tandem with the postulation of late Professor Babs Fafunwa that the foundation of education in Nigeria should be built first and foremost on indigenous languages. As the Yoruba saying goes, the greatest tragedy in life is to get to ones desired goal and finding it empty. Nigerians spit out fire in written and spoken English Language but their fire cannot light ordinary cigarette not to talk of generating electricity. The perfect Nigerian speakers of standard English destroyed our textile industries only to license themselves as sole importers of clothes. But for the stubborn non-English speaking Fulani herdsmen, the verbose English speaking Nigerian veterinary scientists would have turned themselves into Nigeria's importers of biffs from Europe and America. The Nigerian grammarians of English cannot refine crude oil, consequently, the crude oil exporting Nigeria has to depend on fuel import and the fuel importers are the Oxford English speaking Nigerians. Nigerian experts in English language destroyed our agriculture to the extent that Nigeria now depends on imported rice to feed her people. In every aspect of life, Nigerians are very fluent in spoken and written English but nothing functions properly in the country.
Unlike Farooq Kperogi whose egocentric motive was to publicly upbraid fellow Nigerians for committing grammatical blunders in English language, Ayotunde Bewaji reminds us that no American has ever upbraided Donald Trump for his poor and foul use of English Language. People of England, in fact, consider the type of English spoken in America as *cow-boy English.* That consideration has to do with how America was founded. The US as it is today, originated as a mixture of people from various European countries whose languages were different from English Language, although England was first to begin colonial settlements in America. It started with Sir Humphrey Gilbert publishing in 1576 his *Discourse to prove a passage by the North West to Cathaia and the East Indies.* Therein, he set out the advantages of establishing colonial settlements (to be inhabited by dispossessed proletarians and ex-convicts from Britain). Sir Humphrey Gilbert wrote, "We might inhabit part of those countries, and settle there such needy people of our country which now trouble the commonwealth, through want here at home are forced to commit outrageous offences, whereby they are daily consumed with the gallows." (quoted by R. Palme Dutt in The Crisis Of Britain And The British Empire, p.71) It is remarkable that the proposed colonial settlement presumed expulsion or/and extermination of the original inhabitants. In 1585, Sir Walter Raleigh established the first colony in Virginia. The American colonists from Britain were not Whig or Tory noblemen but derelict wastrels, broken men and felons who were the fittest persons to send overseas. Britain considered it better to export their mischievous and useless citizen as the best method of refining criminals. "And after 1719, under two statutes of George I," Lord Elton wrote, "several hundred convicts were shipped annually to Virginia. The Annual Register of 1766 contains a lively picture of the convicts ... passing to the waterside in order to be shipped for America ... And Georgia, the last of the thirteen colonies, was founded in 1733 by the philanthropic General James Oglethorpe expressly for the moral reformation of the inmates of English debtors, prisons, who as he put it in his Brief Account of the Establishment of Georgia, would otherwise starve and burden England. (p.94, Imperial Commonwealth By Lord Elton)." From historical accounts, the early colonial settlers in the US were British semi-literate and illiterate criminals sentenced to banishment to the American colony. In spite of the low level of literacy among the extradited English felons to the USA, Britons constituted the majority among European colonial settlers in the USA and therefore, English became native language even for other settlers from Germany, Netherland, Poland, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Finland and others, whose original mother tongues were different from English. The above stated facts explain why American English is not pure and is quite different from the Queen's English.
As for Donald Trump poor spoken English, it would probably not matter if he should become the US president provided he has his innate intelligence intact. The 17th President of the United States, 1865 - 1869, was a tailor apprentice and an illiterate. He got married at the age of 18 in 1827 to a 16 year old daughter of a local shoe-maker, Elizabeth Mc Cardle. Andrew Johnson's wife taught him how to read and write. Yet he was elected a Mayor, a member of Tennessee House of Representatives, a member of the US Congress where he served for ten years, 1843 - 1853. He was Governor of Tennessee between 1853 and 1857, US senator from 1857 to 1862 and military governor of his occupied Tennesse during the civil war between 1862 and 1865. On March 4, 1865, he was Vice President to Abraham Lincoln in his second term and became President 42 days later when Lincoln was assassinated. Just as the command of English language is not a requisite to be a good President so is fluency in spoken and written English language in Nigeria not a requisite for, production of irons and steels, refinery of crude oil, generation of electricity, production of potable water and building of infrastructures. Nigeria's scientific and technological developments can only evolve from our indigenous languages which to certain extents are inter-related. I am with you, Buba.
S.Kadiri
Från: usaafricadialogue@
googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com > för Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu>
Skickat: den 30 oktober 2016 20:47
Till: usaafricadialogue
Ämne: Re: SV: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Farooq, Funmi and Yona
Thanks for the validation olayinka.
Another thing I remember from that said transcription, he'd start a sentence and then switch halfway through to another sentence or thought, or then go back again.
We don't always speak in complete sentences, or with punctuation!
And of course our purpose in speaking is not to be correct in any formal sense, but to communicate something. And so very often it will be simply a phrase or a part of a sentence.
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/
people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@
googlegroups.com > on behalf of Olayinka Agbetuyi <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com >
Date: Sunday 30 October 2016 at 15:11
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com >
Subject: Re: SV: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Farooq, Funmi and Yona
You are absolutely right Ken. To put it another way when taking my ESOL teaching qualifications I was told that educated Africans sounded stilted when speaking precisely because they tended to speak the ' correct' English 'bookish' version of English devoid of the ellisions and contractions that charactetize normal native spoken English (It is the total flow these that is called intonation and the exact variable characteristics of these constitute what is referred to as regional accents, or, better regional intonation.)
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------
From: Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu>
Date: 30/10/2016 17:44 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@
googlegroups.com >Subject: Re: SV: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Farooq, Funmi and Yona
No, because when we speak we run the words and sounds together. Just listen to yourself and others; we slur our way through words; we elide and collapse words. We don't always match the proper subj and number with the verb.
We are communicating, not printing speech. And most of all, with intonation we create meaning that words, without sound, can't quite capture.
That is my impression, anyway.
I am talking about conversational speech; not written texts.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/
people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@
googlegroups.com > on behalf of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com >
Date: Sunday 30 October 2016 at 11:51
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com >
Subject: Re: SV: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Farooq, Funmi and Yona
k
enneth harrow,
are you not exaggerating?
toyin
On 30 October 2016 at 15:39, Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
Tunde, I try not to listen to trump. But I think we need to distinguish two things: one is "correct" standard English, which we can read in formal exposition, and then spoken English.
Believe me, no one speaks "correct" English.
I once edited a series of talks given at the Afr Lit Assn, including those of gates and said and other luminaries.
Believe me, no one speaks "correct" English!
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/
people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@
googlegroups.com > on behalf of Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com >
Date: Sunday 30 October 2016 at 11:12
To: usaafricadialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com >
Subject: Re: SV: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Farooq, Funmi and Yona
I would like to appreciate Buba's call for the necessity of amplifying the use of indigenous languages.
I'm wary, though, about the notion of indigenous cultures, of which languages are a part, as the solution to Africa's development problems.
Is development not more complex than that?
toyin
On 30 October 2016 at 10:41, 'Ayotunde Bewaji' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@
googlegroups.com > wrote:Does anyone ever listen to Donald Trump mangle up the American English Language? Does anyone notice any American Professor upbraid him or put him down? By taking American English seriously, Americans understand the need for language independence, suggested by Professor Malami Buba that we take our own languages seriously - proven by research at University of Ife, Ile-Ife (now OAU) decades - we will be laying the eternal foundations of our own continental development.
I am still hoping to take seriously a challenge of a Canadian colleague that I write an essay for him in Yoruba language in my area of interest - Epistemology! I have not had the courage to do it yet, but I will, there being life and good health. This still reminds me of Tunji Oyelana on Ede Oyinbo kii se ti baba mi, shared by me previously. And it is one of the reasons I did The Rule of Law and Governance in Indigenous Yoruba Society - A Study in African Philosophy of Law (2016).
Remember the distraction of African societies lacking literary cultures, literatures, histories, philosophies, social and political traditions, etc, etc. At times, I wonder why the gba ran mi d'eleru ti a ji ni do d'oko fun ni. We are a strange people in deed. Oriki Esu Laalu Ogiri Oko shows this well - o b'elekun sun'kun k'eru o b'elekun, elekun n sun'kun, Laaroye n sun ejeI Eni a pe ko wa wo gobi, to ni ki lleleyi gobi gobi? O ma se o! It did for our collective bodi! How we are now our best enemies - Narratives of Struggle (2012).
Ire ni o.
Tunde.
On Sunday, 30 October 2016, 6:18, Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:
Salimonu,
One of my favorite lines from King Lear is, do not come between the lion and his wrath (or maybe it is wroth!)
Me too, I don't want to jump into a fight!
Please make peace, and we can move on….
Best
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
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