 Hello everyone. I'm extremely delighted to welcome you to our first webinar on how should we write Yoruba. I'm Marian Wallace, Lead Curator for Africa at the British Library. I work in the Asian and African collections of the BL where we have large collections, especially of printed books on Africa. Today's webinar reflects the inspiration and hard work of Colla Tobussen, who is a current British Library Chevening Fellow. It's been my privilege to supervise Colla over the last year, when, among other things, he's been investigating our Yoruba language collections, which you'll tell you about later. I'm also very pleased that the Lagos Studies Association and Africa Rights, which is the literary festival of the Royal African Society, are both partnering with us for this event. I'd like to thank them and the illustrious group of presenters and moderators that Colla has put together and everyone involved in organising the event. I'm also delighted to report that there are over 400 people registered for this event, not only as far as we can tell from Nigeria, the UK and the US, but also from other countries including Kenya and Jamaica. Many of you are Yoruba speakers, and we are also glad to welcome others interested in the broader questions we hope to raise today. So without further ado, let me introduce the moderator of today's event, Ade Kumi Olatunji. Kumi is a language enthusiast whose interests include French, Spanish, Mandarin and Japanese, as well as Yoruba, which she studied on the SOAS MA linguistics programme last year. Since graduation, she's been developing learning materials for other Yoruba heritage speakers like herself. Kumi, over to you. Thank you very much, Marion, and welcome to everybody here for this online symposium, grappling with the question of how should we write Yoruba, I know it's one that I have also been thinking about on my course and subsequently. So, we just a few administrative points, we will have a question and answer session towards the end. But that doesn't mean save your questions for the end. Please, as and when you think of them use the Q&A function or the chat to write down any questions you have for our panellists. We have four wonderful panellists, panel members here for you today, who will be presenting for 10 minutes and I've been told to be very strict about this 10 minutes. So I will remind them that they have 10 minutes to present. If you want to have a look at the program and their synopsis of their talks, it's just been posted by Dr. Marin Wallace in the chat section. So, without further ado, I would like to introduce our first speaker, that's Mr. Kola Tabossum. He's a linguist, creative writer whose language work and interests focus on Nigerian and African language documentation and digitization. So, currently, the Chievening scholar, sorry, not Chievening scholar, Chievening British Library Fellow in the Asian and African language collection, his talk is entitled a Yoruba orthography from Ajayi Kralga to date through the collection items at the British Library, progress and problems. So, Kola, I'll pass it over to you for your 10 to 15 minute talk. Thank you. I can't get my video to come on. I need some help there. Okay. Hello everyone. And I'm very glad to be here. I have 10 to 15 minutes, so I'm going to try to get straight to it. I'm very excited to be here and to discuss this subject that has consumed me for a very long time and share with many of my professors and mentors who have looked up to for a very long time. Let me start. So, I hope you can see my presentation. Wait for it to show up. Okay, so I'm talking about Yoruba language, orthography from Ajayi Kralga to date through the collection items of the British Library. They mentioned I've been a research fellow at the library since September, and this continues the observations I've made both through the work, the works that the library holds and Yoruba language writings I've seen in all the places and through my own work in language technology. So that's what I intend to go through. I'm going to run through this like a couple of number of slides has so many things I'm going to try to skip the technical parts so I don't waste valuable time. Yoruba is a major language spoken in southwest Nigeria, many of you know that already the conservative estimate of population is 30 to 40 million. And it's spoken in Benin, Nigeria, in parts of South America, etc. Now, a typical Yoruba text looks like this today. This is from a paragraph that I translated from a short story by Chimamanda Angozia Dicci. It looks like this. And in there, many who are not familiar with this kind of text would notice that critics like the science we put on top of letters and under it. You also notice sounds like this GB, which is pronounced which many non-Yoruba speakers typically have problems with. This particular orthography came as a result of several years of tweaking and change and evolution from the very beginning of Yoruba writing. Now Yoruba letters look like this. Diacritics on top, marks underneath, marks underneath typically are to show the vowel quality. But that's not always been this way. Like I said, the first Yoruba language, right and looked like this. This is a translation of Luke 135 by Jai Crowder. And that is. It's not written this way anymore. Of course, many people who look at this will find this really strange, who are only familiar with current writing. They need to be written like this today, even though many people would want it to be written this way, or don't know any other way to write it except like this. You would find many young people and many people who write and publish today write and without any of the markings, instead of the way it is like this. Many of them also don't have the tools to write it, which is why they're writing like that. This is the reason why we put diacritics on Yoruba writing. There's a sample sentence on top here, which you can pronounce in several different ways, depending on what kind of tones you put on it. Baba Minyukunla is the most common, most reasonable way to look at it, but there are several other ways you could look at it technically. And if without the tone markings on it, you can say so many different things that 31 here can go as fast 51 or so when I try to find it. Again, we go back to Crowder, and you would notice on the left how Crowder tried to write many of these words. Ekun, he wrote it like that. Ekun, he wrote it like this. Ekun, he wrote it like this. Today we write them like this, but when Crowder did, I suspect that he was trying, he was working with the missionaries to try to make sure people can read and write the language. So they didn't pay as much attention to the systematic nature of the language. So you will notice the first and second one, there is no reason to assume from looking at it that this is air and that this is a in the other one. There's nothing there that particularly shows it, but here in the new one, you can see that air is demarcated with a dot under it and a is shown this way. There are many other examples of how Crowder used to write the language and how we write it today. So the first story of how the language came to be written down, you can find it by reading J. Fadir Jais how Yoruba was reduced to writing. He noted many of the problems and many of the fights and conversations that he had. But mostly there was an international conference in 1854 where linguists and philologists and direction of missionary societies came together and decided that they needed to have a harmonized way of writing the language. In the early 19th, 20th century, many of the suggestions they made then started showing up in writings like this Bible by the CMS where you would find a diacritics underneath with nothing above it, where you find this tilt on top of the E here, which continued in many of the writings you find, which when you find this one on the verse five, which is N before the WN. You won't find many of these in modern writings today, but this were the writings they found they did in those times. The tilt particularly remained for a long time. Look at the tilt on top of the E here. And then, you know, writings, usually just the letters with very little sparse markings. Now in 1950 continue the same way you would look, you will find examples of this same tilt here. We've changed this now to, you know, different ways of writing it. In the 20th century, after Fagunwa around that time, a new effort came headed by Professor Yoban Boushe who wrote your biography, and then suggested many new changes to the language, many of which are adopted by the Federal Ministry of Education. He said if you remove the tilt, change it, replace it with diacritics, the way the language is spelled, remove double letters, et cetera, et cetera. Today, many of these words will be written in, you know, different ways because we have, you know, decided how we want them to be written. Bangboushe's standardizations and suggestions were brilliant because they kind of brought logic into the language, and they helped provide a kind of background to many of the work that we're doing in the 21st century where computers started becoming relevant in the writing of the language. They created a basis for the text to speak and many other things. But there are some other problems that he didn't fix. So, for instance, when you signal God today, why do we write it with an N, where A and not an O, not an O, why do we write an O with an O and not an R? Many of these issues are things I found when I started using computers to try to understand the Yoruba terminology. The issue with the N, nasal in Yoruba language, is also something that I've also grappled with. In Yoruba, it can be three things. It can be nasal. It signifies the nasality like in this, like in Ogun de Ogunsoya. But it can also be a letter in itself, like you have in Anomo, where N is just a consonant, and they have it as a syllabic, where you have it in like Ogun de. But when you write Ogun de, where N doubles as both a nasal and a syllabic, then there is a problem. Most people write it in the first, in this first spelling, whereas it's best expressed as a second one. But these are issues that come up when you're trying to bring some real logic and continue the work that Van Gogh did. Like this, look at these names, for instance. On the left, you have the most common spelling of these names in Yoruba today, or Yenusi, Olameson, Agymati, Adenike, Anoluapo, Dunibio, Tinubu. But you can't mark them with the way they are spelled, without including new vowels. But most people don't write them as you find on the right here, with the extra vowels that need to make them possible to be able to mark them with the markings that are provided. And there are a few other issues that remained also from the 20th, 19th century work. So 21st century, 20th century, there were a lot of other issues with publishing, where the language started becoming less important in society. People were not teaching them in schools anymore. The government de-emphasized it, et cetera, et cetera. And then you have books published like this in 1979, where the texts were written and published, and then somebody had to use the hand to include the diacritics, and then reprint it again. There are other examples of a work like this, where you find that by just looking at this, you know that this is a combination of both the computer or the typeface they had then, and somebody using their hand to write it. I've had first-hand experience with this as well, when my father published the European newspaper. So 21st century, there are a couple of other issues that I have found now as an adult working in technology and language. One of them is that on the internet, there are a few tools to write with proper diacritics. We had to invent one with the European names project. Sometimes when you arrive on Twitter, which had a strict character limits, diacritics were often counted as separate characters. So we have 120 characters. If you put a diacritic, it counts as one. Unicode is part of this problem because they didn't create, they didn't allow your robots to be written with pre-composed characters. I wrote a lot more about this in my essay on Debe, which you can read later. We're going to post it on the chat. So there's a number of issues. Again, when you search for a name, for instance, on Twitter, on Google, I'm sorry. If you put the diacritics, you find different results. And if you don't put diacritics, you find different results. These are some of the issues that we deal with today because of the problems of lack of harmonization of how your robots should be written on the internet. And then you have the lack of influence of English, where people start them forifying the way to write their own language and stuff like that. These issues, this particular one's result of the Unicode problems I mentioned earlier, which I'm going to talk about if I get a chance later, where instead of using the proper diacritics in Yoruba, we are forced to use things like this strange characters under. Or when you write properly, you have the ton marks jumping around, like you find in this example. Another one is the fonts, where, you know, look at the way my name, the fonts in my name jumped around and became bigger and smaller, you know, just because the computer doesn't quite recognize how to deal with these particular issues. And then online you find young people, maybe because they don't know how to write the language or because they don't know, they don't have the tools to write it or because they're just willing to just push the boundaries to make the language even more, more, I guess, adaptable to their own current modern circumstances that write in Yoruba with English language forms that look like this, which remind me actually of how crowd I used to write it at the very beginning. I guess I remember I was going to talk about this a few examples I found online a couple of days ago. And then people writing their names in funny ways like this I found is on Facebook. These are the names that I want to write in brackets and this is how they write it online. So what I'm thinking about, while I was trying to set up this webinar is to raise particular questions about how Yoruba should be written in the future and in the present, and how technology can help and whether we do need new ways of writing a language, or whether we need new non-roman scripts that can help better harmonize the problems that were faced so far from the 19th to 21st century, and also probably even cater to issues that arise from the fact that people write the language differently like Benin or, you know, in the Americas, maybe in Yoruba way of writing that kind of covers all the issues that exist all around. How can we bypass the issues with Unicor? Do we need a new conference or Yoruba orthography? I guess this is kind of a precursor to that. And what would that entail, especially also educational writing. And before I go, let me give you a few things I found online that made me laugh a couple of days. When you try to search translated Yoruba expression on Google, usually if you don't put tone marks, it's going to give you a terrible answer anyway, like you can see here. But sometimes, even if you put the tone marks, it still gives you something really, really ridiculous and sometimes funny. Everybody tides me on this on Twitter all the time, but usually because they assume that I work on Google Translate, but I don't. I found it very interesting. This is the last one as well, which is a written we say in Yoruba, which certainly does not mean you died in three days. So I hope this conversation that we have brings us to raise some of the issues that exist and find probably find solutions to many of them. So thank you very much. And I look forward to your questions. Great. Thank you very much, Kola, especially those Google mistranslations at the end. Very, very amusing. So I think thank you very everybody for submitting some of the questions you have. We will be taking them as we go along and each panelist will be speaking first, we'll have a conversation. And then Q&A at the end. So thank you for submitting a question. Please continue to do so. Just in the interim, a quick one. A couple of people have asked about the video being available. Yes, our plan is to make it available on the British Library YouTube channel. Okay, so I would like to introduce our next speaker, which is Professor Karen Barber had the pleasure of meeting her a few times and being tested on my Yoruba, tested and trained on my Yoruba with her. Professor Barber is a cultural anthropologist and academic currently the Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics. She was trained at the then University of Eiffel. And so consequently does not regard the Yoruba diacritics as a pain, but a source of great satisfaction and joy. Her talk is entitled at the pleasure of the pleasures of a well marked page. So please, when you're ready, Professor Barber. It's saying I can't start my video. Okay. Right. Thank you. Well, thanks to Colla, Marion and the British Library for setting up this, this webinar and for inviting me to join us. It's not often that you get an opportunity to discuss your Yoruba lithography with fellow enthusiasts. And thanks also to Colla for that absolutely stunning introductory statements, which more or less covers every single thing I think we're going to be trying to discuss. So as Kunmi just mentioned, I acquired my respect for diacritics at the University of Eiffel, which is now about family, our lower university, where I did my PhD. A year later I was lucky enough to get a job in the Department of African Languages and Literatures. Now, not only did my supervisors teach me how to write down the oricky texts that were the focus of my research, but also once I became a lecturer in the department. I got tremendous emphasis on teaching the incoming first year students the use of tone marks and sub dots. It was absolutely central to the program. It was non-negotiable, it was indispensable, and it was something that I completely internalized. And that's why I'm trying to share my screen. Okay, can you all see that? So this is what gave me my great pleasure and satisfaction in contemplating a well-marked page of Yoruba. This is a novel by Olaida Yoroke-Digi. This is the first page. Look at that, isn't that beautiful? Yoruba orthography, which as Kola has just told us, was developed over more than 100 years of expert consultation and debate by the Yoruba intelligentsia. It is consistent, it's economical, it's comprehensive, and it's highly informative. So that sense of completeness when you see a page like this is aesthetically satisfying, as well as very useful and informative. So I find it odd that so many people seem to think it just doesn't matter. Now, you could argue that no orthographic system is really completely informative. It can't be. It always relies on the reader bringing a certain amount of knowledge to bear on it. And that's why it's been possible for so many writers to communicate and so many publishers to get away with publishing Yoruba without tone marks, because they leave it to the knowledgeable reader to recognize words and to fill in the information that's missing. That actually has worked quite consistently over quite a long period. So for instance, my current research is on the Yoruba language newspapers of the 1920s, at which time everybody used sub dots very consistently and accurately, but they hardly ever use tone marks and they relied on a knowledgeable readership to be able to decipher it. And as far as one can tell, most people were indeed able to do that. And as you've seen, as we just saw in Kola's presentation, Fagunwa has been read by generations of enthusiasts without hardly any, hardly any tone marks in the original versions of Fagunwa. It's only later that new editions were produced where tone marking was considered essential. So people who don't like diacritics could argue that full orthography is only important to people like me. People who don't have sufficient contextual knowledge to supply the missing information. People who only began to learn the language as an adult or the many diasporic Yoruba who are not fully immersed in a Yoruba speaking environment or the increasing number of kids whose parents have dissuaded them from living in the language with all its incredibly rich and varied repertoires. But against that I would say actually in a sense we are all learners, we're all lifelong learners. Nobody can ever know the whole of a language and everybody can continually expand their knowledge. And we do this as much from books or perhaps even more from books than from conversation because it's in books that brilliant writers have preserved and revitalized choice metaphors, idioms, sayings, special vocabulary, as indeed OKDG and Fagunwa and many, many other writers did so brilliantly. Now without full diacritics we wouldn't know what it is we're learning. What is this new word we would ask ourselves? Without full orthography it isn't a word. It can't be realized in our minds and memories as a word. And it's not all just about knowledge and information, it's also about the aesthetic dimension of creativity and play. So for instance if Juan de Abimbola had written his transcriptions of Ifara divination verses without tone marks we would get texts looking like this. What does that look like? It doesn't seem to convey anything much at all. But when you look at the way Juan de Abimbola wrote it with full diacritics you can see the musicality, you can see the balance, you can see the harmony of this Ifara verse which is just important as the meaning. So to my mind there's no arguments against using full orthography but as we've also just heard there are obstacles and to me there are two really major obstacles. The first is the lack of availability of good guidelines, good manuals, good teaching for people who may be in doubt about what full orthography involves. Many people just haven't been taught how to write Yoruba and they feel afraid of it. And secondly the lack of availability of software that's quick and easy to use across many different platforms to use in email, social media, PowerPoints and in text files. And my experience very often has been that you write in one mode, for instance you might write an article carefully putting in all the tone marks and sub dots, send it to your publisher and they read it with a different system which turns it all into little square boxes and stars and exclamation marks. So my hope and I'm hoping very much to pick up some crumbs of information from the table of all the experts which you have gathered around the table of this webinar. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Professor Barba for that very illuminating talk. I wanted to very quickly before we move on to the other presenters just respond to one question, which was whether we can have the webinar in Yoruba language. Great. If we could. But the fact is we have other people here who for Yoruba is not their first language or they're not fluent in it they're not able to understand and keep up myself included. If I'm honest, if this webinar was held entirely in Yoruba, I would struggle. So in the spirit of inclusivity, we're holding this webinar in English. However, you want to write Yoruba, please feel free if you have the software to include the diacritics then all the more reason to show off. And if you could also then translate it into English for people who are not familiar with reading the language that would be great. Okay, and on to our third speaker. Tunde Adewala. He is a humanist human language technologist and the executive director of the African languages technology initiative. Alt I, if I'm not mistaken, which is a research. A research and development agency, which was set up in 2002 for the purpose of developing the necessary resources that will facilitate the engagement of sort of ICT in African languages. So, his talk is about language as technology, a Yoruba perspective. So I will hand over to you, Dr. Tunde Adewala for your talk. Thank you. Do I need my camera on? I'm not able to switch my camera on at the moment. Thank you. Yes, my name is Tunde Adewala. I'm a human language technologist. My concern is to make sure that technologies are available for as many African languages of the world as possible. The title of my presentation is language as technology, a Yoruba perspective. Let me start by explaining what I mean by technology in this context. Fundamentally, technology exploits natural principles for the betterment of the human condition. And for in my understanding, language is a system of symbols that describe the realities experienced and expressed by eight people. I make the point here that the language that expresses the experiences of eight people is of necessity affected by that experience, because it is what you want to express that determines the language in which you express it. Every language of the world uses phenomena encountered in the immediate environment. So we find that every language is affected by the environment within which it was developed. Every language is affected by the realities that it is to express and every language is affected by the experiences of the people that the language is supposed to symbolize. All languages use consonants and vowels to create mineral pairs to distinguish between words. Many languages include tones, many Asian languages, particularly in Africa, very many African languages, tone languages. But the Yoruba uses tones rather heavily. Yoruba depends on tone in a way that many other languages do not depend on tones. And the consequences of this heavy use of tone are rather interesting for the language. Maybe just take some time to describe Yoruba's tonality from the point of view of a human language technologist. Yoruba's tonality is found within other tonalities of many other languages. So many African languages are tone languages. In Nigeria, it is probably only full full day that is a non-tone Nigerian language. Most other Nigerian languages, if not all, but for full full day, use elements of tone to distinguish between words. Many neighbors of the Yoruba people speak tone languages, and many of these tone languages use two tones. Sometimes a third tone, which is restricted, what is usually referred to by linguists as two tones and a down step, that is a situation in which there is a third tone quite all right, that third tone does not occur except in certain environments. But Yoruba uses the three full tones, three full tones such that the three tones can be found in any environment. There are no restrictions for the three tones of the Yoruba. In Yoruba vowels occur freely. But each time a consonant occurs, a vowel comes with it. So consonants do not float around in Yoruba. They are always bound to vowels and you will not find consonant clusters in Yoruba. Now every vowel of Yoruba and therefore every syllable carries one of the three tones of Yoruba. Now I'm going to little mathematics of Yoruba tonality. I have said that Yoruba uses vowels freely, but consonants come with vowels. So there are very many single vowel syllables and many consonant vowel pairs syllables. And any of these vowels can manifest in any of the three tones and each of these manifestations can represent a meaningful word. So it means that you can have one syllable of a consonant and vowel that can manifest in three ways. For example, ba is to perch, ba is to hide, ba is to meet. So we have this consonant vowel pair and the tone that writes on it determines what is meant. So the tone constituting the minimal pair. Now with that single vowel, a single syllable that can manifest in three different ways and can mean three different things. Every extra syllable applied to that syllable multiplies the number of what possibilities by three. Which means if instead of one syllable, we now have two syllables, there are nine possible manifestations of these two syllables. So if you put another ba, another ba, you can have ba-ba, which is like ba-ba or gi-ba-ba, gynecon. You can have ba-ba, father, you can have ba-ba, and you can even have the loan of the person that cuts your hair, ba-ba. And if that tone is not properly reflected, what is said can be lost. So in this kind of circumstance, therefore, you now see that every extra syllable that you add just multiplies the number of possibilities by three. So two syllables produce nine possibilities, three syllables will produce 27 possibilities, four syllables will produce 81 possibilities. And it is not, it may not be every time that every one of these possibilities means something, but more often than not, you find the various possibilities having some consequence. Generally, therefore, we can say that n syllables will produce three to the power of n possibilities. So if you have seven syllables, for example, that would be three times three times three times three times three in seven places, and that will give you 19,683 different possibilities, based just on tones. So the question, therefore, is probably this language could actually be spoken as a whistle talk, because the tone is so important. And what are the consequences of this tonality? The first consequence is that a lot of meaning in Yoruba resides in the tones, just as we have explained, the same consonant vowel pair meaning different things just based on tones. The second consequence is that it could be dangerous to sing Yoruba words to foreign tunes. Abide with me, sung to the English hymn tune. Abide with me, may become, come, let us petrify together, instead of abide with me. Translating a bite with me to Yoruba produced, but the melody of the hymn suggested, let us go septic jointly. So that is what I mean by it could be dangerous sometimes to sing Yoruba words to foreign tune. Somebody once sang the song. He said, or a woolani be guess who innocently means what a friend we have in Jesus. And somebody casually replied, it's only the one on the way to be named, because there's a town on the way to be named called or a, and having sung that song, or a woolani be guess who has or a woolani be guess who it's like what other or a town. Do we have like Jesus? These are the contradictions that come with careless handle of Yoruba tones. Third consequence of this reach tonality is that speaking Yoruba sometimes sounds like singing. So the question is, was that speech? Was that a chant? Was that a song? Because of the intrinsic melody infused in Yoruba ordinary speech by the heavy use of tonality. I find that Yoruba words sometimes ordinary speech in Yoruba words may sound like music to the extent that many Yoruba poetic verses suggest the tune to which they can be sung. And if you do not take the tune that the word suggest seriously, you might just be saying something that doesn't make much sense. By virtue of this tonality also the musicality of the tonality, Yoruba tones are sometimes expressed in a solfige system during me. And that's also evidence to the fact that there's this musicality in ordinary Yoruba speech. Of really, really great importance is the fact that Yoruba can be spoken with drums. Many Yoruba people do know that a drummer can say things to those who understand. It was the scholar Uli Baer that said that the statement made by Yoruba drum could sometimes be ambiguous, but to the educated Yoruba, the ambiguity is easily resolved. Just as the ambiguity that Karin talked about in the absence of tone marks in Fagua books, in the same way just the use of tones alone sometimes is enough to convey meaning. So it is of extreme importance therefore to mark tones in Yoruba. I read probably an anecdotal story, but it was reported in a formal paper that Henry Townsend, the Reverend Gentleman that first put Yoruba in print, brought a printing press for Yoruba in Agaiputa in the 1800s, was getting frustrated with the regularity and frequency of the need to change the dyes for the printing press. And he noted to Crowder that the diacritics wore out first and was trying to persuade Crowder to drop the use of diacritics and Crowder retorted that whenever any of these diacritics wore out, it means that the whole character has been mutilated and the die needs to be changed. But you find that many people today still argue about doing tone marks, they feel it should be possible to read Yoruba without tone marks. Karin Baba has done a wonderful work, a wonderful job of explaining that position. But what concerns me particularly now is Yoruba and information communication technology. Information communication technology started as highly specialized things in highly specialized environments. At that point, ICT skills were specialized skills. But today, ICT skills are no more specialized skills, they are no more merely professional skills, they've become life skills. And any language for which ICT is not available becomes immediately in danger. But the foundational availability of ICT for any language is in the Unicode. The Unicode is the universal code in which every language of the world has a system by which it would be typed on the computer. The Unicode is a very, very important issue in computing because it is the Unicode that helps to stop the problem in which somebody prints something in Yoruba somewhere, sends it to somebody else and it ends up gibberish. This is the role that Unicode has played in unifying the coding structure of various languages. But due to the lack of full understanding of Yoruba tonality, Unicode does not think it is necessary to provide unique code points for Yoruba pre-composed characters. Paula has mentioned this in passing, but this is a fundamental problem in putting Yoruba on ICT because if you have to compose on the fly, a Yoruba character like the sub dotted low tone E. There are myriads of ways. You can type an E first, put a sub dot, put a low tone first, put a sub dot, put an E, put a sub dotted E, put a low tone on it, or take a low tone E and put a sub dot under it. And all those various possibilities cause confusion at the back end when one is engaged in natural language processing of the Yoruba language. So this coding system remains, it is usable, it is still a problem and entreaties to Unicode does not seem to have changed anything. But it remains of utmost importance to apply their critics to Yoruba writing and we shall continue to try to develop software that makes it easier to develop software that even reduce the quantum of writing involved, develop speech recognizers that can convert Yoruba speech straight into written text and speech synthesizers that can convert Yoruba straight from written text to speech. As I said earlier on, Yoruba is so musical that when it is spoken it sometimes sings. Just as Yoruba speech rings as sung, so also would you find the diacritics dancing on the pages of a well laid out page. Karen has also talked about that already. So please preserve Yoruba diacritics. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Dr. today. I agree we need to preserve these diacritics. Okay, so before we go on to the final presentation. Again, I just wanted to reiterate that this symposium recording of this symposium will be made available on the British libraries YouTube channel. So you can see what's after if you haven't had if you're missing some of it now or if you want to share in the future you'll be able to do so via YouTube, whether or not the slides will be available that's something we can look into as well. Okay, so our final presentation will be made by Professor Olufemi Taiwo. He's based at the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University in New York. One of his aims is to expand the African reach in philosophy and simultaneously to indigenous the discipline and make it more relevant to Africa and African students. So his presentation is titled what's orthography got to do with it and doing philosophy in a Yoruba key. So, Professor Taiwo, I'll hand over to you for our final presentation. Hello. Can you hear me? Loud and clear. Can you all hear me? Yes, we can. Okay. Can you see the screen I'm showing? Yes. Okay, so you see color and Albert you have turned me into a genius, right? Because I've never done this before. First let me thank Colla and Dr. Wallace for saying yes to him when he shared my late arrival in this program. But I also want to accuse him of not, I thought he liked me. I'm really a malam to come and do something for Yoruba in Yoruba. We are really asking him to come and fall on his face. So thank you Colla for doing that. My presentation today has to do with what happens when we take the language into specific areas, especially when we're talking about theory, making, what we're talking about philosophizing, talking about analyzing and doing many of those things that advanced studies are supposed to permit us to do. So I'm not just talking in terms of enjoying reading, literary appreciation and all that. I'm talking in terms of breaking down, doing analysis in the language in a very formal way. And if you have been following African philosophy, pretty much, one of the problems is that people think that if they speak Yoruba, they are therefore capable of thinking and writing in Yoruba. And because most of what they write in the philosophy is now written in Yoruba, what you end up with are Yoruba words, phrases, especially proverbs being incorporated into the writing with no attempts made at a granular analysis of some of the stuff that they deploy in those writings. Yes, if there are philosophers on the list right now, I'm talking to you. We're dropping the ball. And I hope that what I share here today clues people into the need for us to do some very, very significant investigation of our relationship to the language and show some respect to it. Several years ago I was publishing a book, and I told the publishers that the book was not going to be out unless they did all the Yoruba occurrences in the book properly with all the marks. They practically had to go out to get additional, you know, software and so on and so forth. And I'm glad I did. And I said to them, when you publish a book in Sabokroat, which is spoken by probably the population of Ibadon, if not your state, you follow the rules. And when anybody writes in French, if the marks are not there, you're not writing French. So the attitude I take is, if you are writing Yoruba and the critical marks are not there, I'm sorry. You might call it Yoruba, but I don't think that you are writing Yoruba. That's really for me. We should stop treating African languages as if they are poor cousins of other natural languages in the world. So let's see if there is integrity to these languages. So now, several years ago, I got into an argument in collaboration with a colleague of mine, Professor Olatunde Laouye, who is at the University of Ibadon. I got into an argument with my former teacher, the late Professor Akeshola Akiwawa. Professor Akiwawa tried to do sociology in Yoruba and he tried to create a theoretical paradigm for doing sociology in an African idiom. So he went into the Ifa divination, you know, system and brought out what he called the Iyadual Ashwada as the foundation, the fountain from which to draw these theoretical underpinnings. And the key word, the key word that he tried to turn into a concept for analysis is the word Ashwada. But you see, I said Ashwada. But that really does not capture it because Ashwada has at least two meanings depending on the tones that you are using. So there is Ashwada and there is Ashwada. So what I've done in this example, since then other people have joined the debate, but conveniently neglecting the fact that Professor Laouye and I already pointed out that Ashwada is not one word. And that what two marks you put will give you different meanings. And my argument is that if you are not paying attention to those, the analysis that you build on those wrongly characterized words cannot be sound. So let me give you the example. And when Kola asked me about this, I put together a few other examples. Let me go through those first. Before I run out of time and then I'll come back to the ashwara and ashwara. Look at IA on the current slide. I have put four different meanings of IA right here. And notice they all have the same, they are two marks, the same tones. But they all don't mean the same thing. And I am yet to see a philosophical analysis when people deploy some of these, you know, where there has been attention paid to the sophistication of the language and the real meanings away from translations into English that need to be taken seriously. Here's another one, you know, two others. And then you have Iyami and Iyami. Now, if you ever turn to your mother and call her Iyami, you who know Yoruba, you know that there's going to be an issue. It could be a federal case between you and your mother. But I have been at a conference where a professor was mixing both of them and really covered an attitude when they were corrected, you know, that the two things do not mean the same thing. But that's what happens when people don't pay attention to the sophistication of the language, you know, that they are deploying. And then when they pretend to be the authorities, you know, of course, I am not an authority, I am just saying, when we're using the language, let's not only use it correctly, let us show some sophistication in the deployment. You look at these five words that I've put here, re, re, re, re, re, re. For each one of these, especially if you want to do epistemology, you know, re becomes very important because, you know, that's what you see. And then you can begin to decompose what it is to see in Yoruba. And then when you come to really, there is something there that is on one hand about seeing, but on the other hand, it recalls something. So there is some measure of recollection, but of course, really is also what we use to describe something that's dirty, which tells you that there is a connection between something that you've seen before, really. And something that is now reflecting the time that it has been there gathering moss. And again, because we usually write in English and just put the Yoruba in almost as garnish, we are never exercised, you know, by these issues. So let me now go back to the main one that I want to talk about. When you say that something is ashua, it is in the state of being together. We were near ye, tabi'iko ishua. But when you say that somebody is an ashua, that's in the subject position, you know, as we're saying in English or uluwa, you know, for those who write Yoruba. And the opposite of ashua is aishua, that is, to be out of, you know, that being, that state of being. Whereas the opposite of ashua is a laishua, one who does not, one who fails, you know, to shua. Now, this has implications for how you describe society, how you describe human nature, and the whole debate about ashuada has to do with what exactly is the nature of society, and what is the nature of those who make it up. So while you use ashua as the state of being together, you know, in community, and you use ashua as somebody who is thriving to be in that community, or who is a member of that community, who is a part of that community. When people begin to depart, you know, from that requirement, it actually has implications for what kinds of ethical judgments we pass on them, you know, in terms of individualism and communalism. And these have very, very deep foundations in Yoruba metaphysics, in Yoruba social philosophy, in Yoruba ethics. And I'm saying that the implications of feeling to pay attention to these very simple marks, you know, that are right there, are that you end up with analysis that does not really illuminate. For me, the question is not to know whether there's any other way that we should be writing Yoruba. The question is, how do we get people and create the resources for more people to be able to do the kind of thing that I'm asking for, both as in respect for the language, but more importantly, as in respect for the business of educating the world. Thank you very much. Thank you very, very much, Professor Taiwo. That was very, very interesting. I have a lot of questions, but it seems so does everybody else. We are actually scheduled for a short interval, a short break. I guess you can go and get a cup of tea or a bathroom break or whatever it needs to be. And afterwards, we will have a discussion with the panelists and also the opportunity for some people to ask their questions live, but I will also be asking some of your questions to the panelists as well. Okay, so we'll just take a pause here for a few moments and we'll rejoin. I guess in a few minutes. Lovely presentations. Okay, we're good to go. Okay, thank you everybody. Welcome back for anyone who went away. And looking forward to this next part of this symposium, we'll have a short sort of discussion with the panel members and then followed by the questions, questions and answers that you have posed. I just wanted to start first of all, perhaps with Colla, you gave the first presentation. Can you speak more about the solutions that you think that can help you about and other African languages and perhaps other tone of languages cope better in this technological age. Yes, thank you so much. And I really enjoyed the presentation by my professors. Much of my work these days have been in following what Dr. Dibola says, making technology more able to deal with languages. And much of what I tried to do in the presentation was point out the issues I've come across, and the questions about whether we need new ways of fixing those solutions, these problems, or whether the script itself is what needs fixing. So on the other hand, on the one hand of the technology, we have two marking software that I developed that we developed at your band name.com, the project I started in 2015. And if you go to write your robot.com I put that in the chat room. You can download the stone marking software, which you can use on your computer and mark and windows. If you use mobile software as you can download the G board, which I also worked on while I worked at Google, which helps you on the mobile devices to be able to put on marks on your words. I think Kimman also does the same thing. So there are software solutions that hopefully become more popular and get into more use. But I'm interested in even more questions about, you know, what new suggestions we can, we can provide to your robot right in itself to make the script itself more easy to learn and to be able to use in literature and other spaces. Yes, would anybody from the panel have something to say to that last point actually, maybe to Dr Avila in the presence of sort of in the absence of maybe government support in terms of big tech, how, what can we do is hope lost. Yeah. What I have seen as the main problem actually has been the attitude of the speakers of the language. A few years ago, I was involved in the localization of Microsoft windows for your bar and house and very few people felt there was a need. They saw it as some kind of just a novelty, nothing of real worth. So the problem really comes from that end because by the end of the day, I don't think Microsoft was impressed with the take the optic of the work that was done. As for government involvement that I think that's a really, really tall order. People who understand what the problems are people who know the consequences of not getting ICTs to be able to to be useful in languages need to roll up their sleeves and get software out there that can make these things easy, particularly taking the queue from development in artificial intelligence, making it possible to have speech synthesizers and speech recognizers that cut off the manual typing part of it. Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much for the answer. I mean, we have some very interesting questions that I think are potentially related. Let me see if we can call some of the panelists to actually, sorry, some of the attendees to actually ask their questions and see if we can do that. But before we get to that section, maybe to Professor Barber. What do you, what would you say to those who think maybe that we actually need a new script for Yoruba? It's hard to imagine a script that would actually surpass the one we already have, which as I said has been developed and refined over a hundred and, well, by now, 150 years by experts and intelligentsia who, you know, have given deep thought to this. To me, it's a simple, efficient, informative and consistent system. What's amazing to me is that Microsoft Word, whose simple sets include the most extraordinary range of orthographies, can't cope with something so relatively straightforward as simply a Latin style alphabet with a few extra additions. I mean, why is it so difficult? I just don't understand why it isn't made really easy to use. And that's, Professor, I did what I was saying. You have to first type the sub dotted letter and then add the tone mark or you have to do it the other way around. Then they separate out when you're trying to copy and paste and you get tone marks without, without letters underneath them. I mean, why? Yeah, why indeed? I don't know. But what I'm saying is I don't think it's a problem with the simplicity or consistency or comprehensiveness of a script. To me, it's fine. It's a question of getting a technology that can produce these relatively straightforward symbol sets without all the palava. Can I say something? Please. Let's remind ourselves the difference between French and Yoruba is that we have dots under certain consonants and vowels. The high tone and the low tone, you know, the accents are the same. Okay. Now, when you look at some of the other languages that these high tech companies provide for, it tells you something about how they look at us. And that they look at us is not their problem. I'm sorry to say. As we say in Yoruba, when you have people who are actually advancing the idea that maybe we need a new script for Yoruba, where exactly does that come from? To what end? For whose purpose? What exactly is the problem with the present script, given how advanced it is now in terms of capturing the language? And it is only the academy, I'm sorry to say, that we have this anxiety. I've had this conversation with Kola and other people before. The amount of new words that go into Yoruba language every day, if you just listened to only the Yoruba speaking local stations in the western part of the country will blow your mind. Which tells you that this is a versatile language that is forever expanding to accommodate ever new realities, but whose scholars are so irresponsible. They are busy, countering to whatever it is that Bill Gates wants. Instead of saying, we are a market of 40 million people. It's not of money to be made from paying attention to us and doing good business as a result of that. We are the problem. It's not the companies. I'm sorry. Yeah, that's a very interesting point. I wanted to segue on to somebody who actually asked a question or made a comment about Ajami when we're thinking about other ways to write Yoruba and other ways to write African languages. There are scholars who are working or writing about and discovering about the Ajami system. So if I can invite Professor Amidusani, sorry if my tones are wrong on that, Vice Chancellor for Foundation University in Mushubu, Nigeria to ask his question or make his comment on this topic. Hello, fellow panellists. Hello. Can you hear me? We can hear you. Thank you very much. Well, actually from Fountain University, not Foundation. Anyway, it's still similar. I just want to express my position for all those of Nigeria so far. And there are two basic things. Well, there is a blog by Professor Ajami. I will be able to share with you later on that the earliest documentation of Yoruba language in any script was actually an Arabic script in the 17th century. And I will be able to share with you that. But beyond that, the problem of documentation of Yoruba using writing Yoruba language has to do with the orthography. I mean, we have videos, dialects. Let me give you a simple example. In the Yoruba dialect, John Peel was with me some years before he died and we were trying to discuss that, okay, we have Lee and me, something Lee in the Yoruba, for example. And by the way, Yoruba was in me. So there is that problem of orthography and the standardization of the orthography will be very, very important in evolving the standard or acceptable Yoruba orthography. Then again, the use of the Arabic letters for Yoruba language, of course, maybe outside your current remit or discussion. It's very, very significant in recent times because international organizing, for example, the ISIS school, which is the equivalent of UNESCO in the Islamic world, was trying to evolve a new Yoruba orthography for Yoruba language, but of course in Arabic school. But the problem then arose. Most of those who are employed on the project were called the periphery Yoruba speakers from Elori and whatever. I mean, we do not consider Elori as the standard Yoruba language, so to say. I mean, thinking of terms of Yoruba, ISIS and things like that. So my question now is this. How can we now make sure the correct or acceptable, every script will be correct, the acceptable or commonly acceptable script will be available, particularly if you look at Nollywood these days. Nollywood is a very popular television or something, even in Bollywood, you see some of them speaking Yoruba language. And you wonder which, if you want to transcribe, I mean, you have a lot of subtitles of some of these things. So how do we now evolve a standard and acceptable orthography that will be widely used in the media, in authorship and stuff like that. And I think there is a need to do more of this in terms of making it popular and acceptable for academic purposes. Even in our universities, and this is just my submission very much. May I? Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Go ahead. Thank you very much. Professor, we do for that. I think we cannot make too much issue of dialects, because every language manifests dialects. Any time that people are separated by time and space, the language they speak will evolve in slightly different directions, and the issue of dialects will arise. One point I think we are missing is that Yoruba is not written sufficiently often today. If there is more writing, if there's more interest in writing and reading Yoruba, there is a way that writing develops some kind of standardization. And it is this, the fact that many Yoruba people don't write Yoruba. Many Yoruba people don't read Yoruba. Many Yoruba people don't even think it's important to write or read Yoruba. And that's why Professor Tygo talked about a 40 million market. Unfortunately, the Yoruba language does not have a 40 million market. The large proportion of that 40 million market has been sold to English, and that's why the language finds itself where it is. I find Professor Amidou's reference to Agami interesting. It's a subject I'm very, very interested in. I've been studying pre-Christian Yoruba thought, and I have had the good fortune of coming across some Agami screens to be able to find some of these things. But Agami itself suffered from the same problem Latin suffered for, much less. I'm sure Professor Amidou is aware of the statement, Alangami langyamin ye, that it is sometimes only the writer of Agami that can decrypt what he has written. And that also holds for even Hausa, in which Agami is a lot more successfully written. They say in Hausa, Agami gagara meshi, that Agami sometimes confound even the writer. And this is because of the lack of standardization. When scholars develop the language, develop a writing system in their silos, it's the same thing we experienced in the last 15 to 20 years in ICT, where somebody develops some system of writing Yoruba on the computer, sends it somewhere else. And it comes at us gibberish. And that is the same situation that occurred in the 18th century, the 17th, 18th, 19th century, when the position Alangami langyamin ye came Yoruba and in Hausa, Agami gagara meshi. Thank you. Can I say something? I don't know whether I'm understanding the question, but we do have standardized Yoruba already. You can't have a language in which people are writing doctoral dissertations in the language. And say that those dissertations are written in dialect. They're not written in dialect. But that is what separates Yoruba from some other Nigerian languages. My ICT friends can complain about how your people have been realized them. That's okay. The truth of the matter is that the Yoruba that is taught formally is what, as in English, people will call the RP. And unfortunately, to go back to what Dr. de Bola just said, because we do not have a quality control mechanism, you find even academic books that write about particular regions of Yoruba. I don't know is the most serious for me where people actually do field work and transcribe in the dialect and present it as if it's standard Yoruba. So that those who do not know the dialect who are reading it, the stuff does not make sense to them because they don't know the dialect. And they think, okay, but it's Yoruba. So why am I having, you know, all these difficulties. So what that calls for, again, for me is for scholars of this language to begin to take a job seriously in terms of cleaning up the mess in every other culture. That is what their scholars do. That's what we're failing to do. And that's not to say that there have not been any efforts. I think we need to remember the work of the Yoruba, you know, the attempt, you know, to create Yoruba languages, you know, back in the 80s and 90s. And the fact that, you know, on three years ago, there are new words coming out from Professor Yolana and I will do, you know, on how to write Yoruba properly, incorporating many of the changes that Professor Baba mentioned, and bringing them to to this point. But again, if people took seriously formal education in the language, they will seek out all these things. So all of us will learn other languages, whether it's German or it's French. We know that we cannot just go anywhere and grab whatever we see and then write it and say that, yes, you know, we have written this German, you know, I think Yoruba needs to develop, you know, towards that. I have the resources. Dr. de Gola in terms of market, I have to disagree with you. Again, Nigeria is where the leadership should come from. But when I have Garifuna people when I was in Seattle, who practically got me to organize the Yoruba language class for their Orisha community. We're not talking of small numbers. So look when I held a conference on NIFA at Harvard University in 2008. The hall was filled to rafters for the three days and 90% of the people who are there were not from Nigeria. They are all diasporic. So people are looking for leadership. People are looking for instruction. We are not offering it. That's what I'm trying to say. And if I may add one thing, something I've often lamented is the absence of a monolingual dictionary of Yoruba. Most dictionaries you find are bilingual as if, you know, you're catering to somebody translating from one language another, rather than dictionaries that actually serve those who speak the language as first languages or, you know, people who want to use the language, you know, for other purposes. We are trying to create a monolingual dictionary at Yoruba word.com, you know, we have Yoruba names for names, but we're trying to have Yoruba word.com where the definitions of the words are in Yoruba specifically. And then English is just perhaps there somewhere in the bottom just for people who care for just translation of words. But I think it's important to have a language to have that kind of resource as a way of, you know, helping the language grow. And another way, of course, is also translations. We think we've had many people talk about translations into English. I work in literature, you find a lot of grants for translating works into English, but very few to translate works into Nigerian languages into Yoruba, for instance, and this is not a fault of foreigners who, of course, would not put money down to translate works into other people's languages, but also elites and people who have the money and the resources who have not paid as much attention to that space. As we know in language technology, as if we can create a corpus of the language on the internet, it helps in several other ways, people who are trying to create technological tools will have a lot of things to work with. Now, before the BBC came, you couldn't find a website where you could find a properly marked Yoruba sentence, you know, that you can rely on. Even the BBC now still makes occasionally makes mistakes or sometimes doesn't use, you know, don't use the term marks as they should. But the more people write in the language, the more resources are created, the more people translate into the language, the more people publish in the language, the more resources are created. Is it irony, of course, that when the British were around or in charge of Nigerian publishing industry, there was a lot of more books published in Yoruba from Fagma to Palli T to etc. We are in charge of the publishing industry in Nigeria now and you don't have as many new works being published in the language. So there's a lot of things we have to do by ourselves. And I think that that's an important, important way to go. Okay, thank you very much for those answers. Actually preempted some of the questions I had so I'll ask some that came from the attendees. So some historical questions actually. Anybody can answer. This, this one is from Fadeh Kungayo, who asked, why did Bishop Crowther write the Yoruba Bible? Was it part of sort of a Christian mission drive to spread religion as influence? Or was it done in any way to protect the language? Anyone want to answer this, this question? Yeah, I mean, the first missionaries had to do was to translate sacred texts into the especially Protestant missionaries to translate texts into local languages so that they could evangelize more efficiently and more quickly, but then it would be possible if they had to teach everybody to read English or whatever the language of the mission missionaries was. So basically huge amounts of linguistic work were done. And of course not quickly appreciated anymore by these early missionaries. The first thing they did was to bring a printing press and to start producing translations of biblical texts. So that's what it was for. But it had enormous consequences because people in the, in the area didn't confine themselves to using these technological resources for for religious purposes. And very quickly you get newspapers and all kinds of texts written and printed by people who are not part of the missionary efforts. So it was taken over very quickly, especially in southwestern Nigeria. You get independence. Yoruba language publishing as early as the 1870s 1860s. So, I would say that's the missionaries didn't know what they were unleashing. If I may. Yeah, I think I printed you the last time. Sorry. Yes. Interesting perspective there. For me. Basically, the, there was this interaction between a religion of the book. And an oral culture. That was the situation that ensued when Christianity was introduced to Yoruba land and the, the missionaries needed to get texts of this religion of the book. And the people that are fundamentally oral, I mean, like what I will say, people with a high oral residue, and the people who are eager to embrace literacy, and the missionaries were surprised at the rate at which literacy spread. But the interesting thing is that probably 200, 150 years later, there is now a resurgence in our richer because you're hardly going to any church today and you won't find people. So, you know, the, the, the, the, there's a pent up energy that the duality of original and literature has released into the Yoruba society. But this is not it's not. It didn't happen only with the Yoruba. You find that most parts of the world. It is a religion that develops language, literacy, even or richer. Traditionally, it's, I mean, Professor Amidou referred to the effect of Islamic writing in your on your Bible before Christianity came so it's always religion that gives that religious people have the sufficient energy to do what is necessary. I mean, you talked about the, what BBC has done in making Yoruba available online and what BBC has done is a joke compared to what the give us witness have done. So you find that religious fable, you cannot discount it in the development of language. Yeah, that's, that's, that's very true. I think I've noticed that sort of in various contexts, the, the language religion being a driver for maybe language revitalization or language preservation documentation. Yeah, very interesting. By the way, before you go on, there's something I just remembered I could add to what you said was growing up in Nevada. The, the most of the churches that we, that we saw and some of which we attended had your bus services first. Mostly Yoruba. So most of you are acquired was from, you know, interact with so many other spaces, including the church where the service from beginning to end was in your body songs, everything. We were growing up after a while we started having interpretations where the pastor was speaking Yoruba, and then there would be somebody who spoke in English to interpret what it was saying. That also helped in helping the young child understand both Yoruba and English. But after a while we got to a point when the pastor started preaching in English and then having somebody interpreted in Yoruba. And then the influence of English totally took over an example of a church. I remember, I've been like this or says you're aware by, you know, a couple of years ago, the pastor who originally preached only in Yoruba started preaching in English. And then, you know, sometimes you have a translation or sometimes you didn't and you also have a second service in English. So there is also a problem as well that has also affected religion, in which case, in English, the determinants of English globalization in modern times has also kind of, you know, removed the effects that the church and religion could have had in helping the language grow and spread. Yeah, yeah, that's an interesting point. Actually, it leads quite nicely onto some other questions I was going to ask from audience members or participants about English and the effect of English or loan words. And primarily they're borrowed from English on Yoruba and also on how we mark those words with tone. So one question was, is it impossible to tone mark a borrowed word table, for example, has no direct translation Yoruba. So is it important or necessary to tone mark Tabili, they wrote Tabili with no tone marks. So again, I don't know how. I'd say yes. I'd say yes. I mean, that happens in many, when restaurant became an English word from French, I think it's, yeah, people call it restaurants. And that's what it is when it comes into a language becomes part of that language. And we treat it as how we treat other words in the language, I think that's my own attitude to it in any case. I give the example of Baba earlier on. I mean, if you don't tone mark Baba, you will mistake it for Baba or for Baba. I mean, the language is essentially a tone language and when you loan words into the language, the loan words have to obey the phonology of the language. Yeah, some of the examples of words that don't actually change, maybe in English from French, but it's not in all cases. It will come down to style. Like, you know, New Yorker would write probably a word without any of the markings from the language from which you came. Maybe New York Times would do it differently. So I mean, variations happen, but mostly the languages when when you import a word, you just, the word becomes part of the new language. Karen Baba, sorry, I interrupted. No, I was just going to say, instead of saying Baba, you could say Nimbadhyamo. That would solve the problem. But that is also a loan word from Baba. And for all people who have those anxieties, we have a world famous example. It's called English. Yeah. So anyway, yeah, that's all I'll say. A follow up question for that was what do we do about the new anglicized translations or anglicizations of words like radio for radio. The attendee said, I remember it used to be with error. I don't know this word. So now many of us called textbooks just translated as radio. And with television. So what do we do, I guess, is the thing is the question being asked. Do you have a solution? If I may, I think there are different ways in which to write a language. Like in English, you would find people who write in, you know, highly poetic forms. You find people who write in very playful forms. You're right to write in ebonics, et cetera, especially literature. I think literature perhaps gives you the most liberty to try and do several different things with language. There's not just one way in which your language exists. And when I was translating the short story I mentioned earlier, the theme of the work and the way the characters interact with each other determined the type of language I put in the mouth. That the way I translated the work from English into Europe. And I think that would matter if you translate the Bible. There is a formal way in which you, you know, try to put the language down. If you're translating an interaction between two high schoolers or two people, you know, in a club. There's something you can put in the mouth. So I think all of those things can exist. You can have the imported words, languages grow by importing words anyway. So there's nothing wrong with that. But you can also have the original, you know, interpretations from original translations that, you know, that exists. I think there's enough space for all of it. We had so many more questions, but I don't know if we have time to get through them all. We had one that was potentially, I don't know, critique maybe. So the person who asked this question is just K. So having listened to the speakers, they say that it's clear that the panel consists of sort of hardcore adherence to the status quo for whom the use of words and sub-dots is non-negotiable. If you agree with that, the question is, is there any room for compromise at all? And will the panel be willing to explore what form that compromise could look like? Do we have to? I mean, we can read some people, as Karen mentioned, were able to read Yoruba without the marks before they were sort of standardized. So is there any room for compromise? Let's say something about that. I believe, and Colla can correct me, that the Yoruba Orthography Committee made its recommendations in 1969, was it? I didn't say that everything has to be completely sub-dotted and term-marked. It was quite acceptable to use just sub-dots, which are, as you say, vowel quality. You can't write the vowel off without a sub-dot. But it seemed to be that you could add tone marks for purposes of disambiguation. But where there's a really well-known string of words that nobody would misunderstand, then it may not be considered necessary to use tone marks. I think that's what the recommendation was. But to me, the problem with that is that you have many words which don't carry tone marks because they're on midterms, so Ashok or more. Now, if I don't know in advance, how do I know that this is a word that should or should not carry tone marks? If you only tone mark certain words for purposes of disambiguation, that's why I think consistency all the way through is a better solution. But it's not impossible to just use tone marks when you want to disambiguate. People have done that very successfully. And I would say that even present-day newspapers often don't fully tone mark the text, and it's still perfectly comprehensible. So it's the sub-dots that are important. But what's weird is that because people have accents, you know, French accents in their symbol sets, and they don't have sub-dots, I've seen a lot of texts where people have tone mark but not sub-dotted, which is not really, that's not even minimal best practice. I think it is negotiable. I mean, I said that the university, the Department of African Languages and Literatures said it was non-negotiable, but that's because they were training specialists in Yoruba language and literature who were going to get degrees written in Yoruba language. But for many purposes, you actually can get away without using the tone marks. And if it's easier and quicker, then why not? May I? Yes, go on, sir. My problem is a little different, because what I'm trying to do is to get computers to read Yoruba to people. And without the tone marks, the computer is lost. And I don't think, I know Kola very well. I know Professor Baba's work. I think I've read Professor Taiwo on issues. I don't think we are being hard, not taking a hard position. But the question is, what is the objective of compromise? Why do we want to shift position on tone marking? Is it because it's difficult? Is it because somebody is lazy to do it? My experience is that the problem comes from so many years of literacy in English that we now see Yoruba as unnecessarily difficult. Whereas the Chinese who write it differently didn't see it difficult. I happen to have worked with a friend who was developing keyboards for Amharic. They had this problem long, long, long time ago, because they used their language. And when computers came, the Ethiopians had to solve the problem of writing Amharic on the computer. While we were playing around with a sub-dot or no sub-dot tone mark or no tone mark, the reason why we are asking for a compromise is because we have been distracted by English. English is not a tone language. Should we also argue for relaxing the spelling rules of English if we are asking for negotiation in tone marking? I think that is the way we should look at it. I think the answer is no. I have one little thing to talk about. Who works in technology? He has mentioned the crucial thing, which is that in language technology we are trying to help to make computers be able to read and understand Yoruba. And to do that, it needs to understand the system as it exists. But I think there is also some other solution that we as people working in technology might also be able to consider. When we are talking about automatic tone application, which a number of people have done some work in that, I think it is probably as well. It is probably a solution that can help not to prevent people from learning how to tone mark, because I think it is a good skill to have as a Yoruba speaker, and that we should put in our educational system from the time that children are young. But for the technological age, it might also help, especially for those who don't speak Yoruba as a first language, to have programs like artificial intelligence enhanced programs that can understand from contexts that when somebody writes a sentence without any tone marks, this might be what they mean. I mean, to take a while to get there and many of us are working in that regard, but that's also a potential solution. But the aim of the solution again is not to prevent people from actually learning to use it to learn how to mark in words because the language is a tone mark language. It is to help those who might not know how to do it, to still be able to cope with the restrictions and the problems that technology provides. I think we should set up a market in training people all over the world. I have not heard the kind of case we just made color made by anybody learning Chinese right now. And Chinese is not the easiest language to learn. Why are we always open to this? Let's make it easier. No, no, no. When you write French on Microsoft Word, it can correct you. When you write English, they are auto-corrects. We need solutions like that help as well. We can do that. So go right ahead. You guys who are in technology, please do. But I'm saying the motivation should not be to make things easier for people. The motivation should be to get people to learn things the right way. And the right and wrong ways, I think in America, I always tell my students, they speak American, I speak English. That's how you know the variations that you're dealing with, you know, even for a language that is supposed to be standard all over the place. I'm an Australian, you know, and look, I'm with Dr. Adebola and Boris Obaba, you know, for me, the issue is how do we create the institutions that will enable people to have help when they need it? I think it's both of those things that sort of have to come together. Technology has to play a part in that. Otherwise, why are we writing in Europe? As Professor Adebola said before, the market of people writing in Europe is not even as big as the people who are speaking it. So technology has to play a part. So I wish we had more time to talk more and ask more questions. We had so many questions from so many people and we didn't even get a chance to ask everybody who wanted to ask their own questions to come and join us. However, I'm going to ask Professor Saeed Adebola to give the closing remarks. He's the president of the Lagos Studies Association. I believe your camera is a bit skewed. Switch it so that we can see you, we can hear you. I thought I had the right direction. Can you hear me now? Yes, we can. I thought I was going to talk tomorrow. I actually didn't know I was I was scared to talk today. Is that right? But nonetheless, I would like to thank all the presenters for the nice presentation. Professor Fermi, Taiwo, Professor Adebola, and Colato Bosoom. I think that the conversations we're having, there are really significant conversations around the relationship between the way we write Yuba and other dynamics, especially technology and socio-economic implications. And I really like the discussion, especially about the globalization of the language itself, how to make the language accessible to multiple audience and the problematics of the different dialects that we have and the implication of this problematics. For example, I love the conversation about Goumina, and I think how ethnographies conducted in one particular socio-economic, socio-economic group, Yoruba sub-social grouping, and then have to be translated into Yoruba or then the implication of this. So I think that this is a very important conversation, and the conversation should continue. It should continue within the context of the issues we've raised today, about technology, very important, about the political economy of language, and of course about the globalization of the language. And also, that's also continued within the context of academics and intellectuals, consistently having significant interface with the regular or daily users of the language. I like the conversation about the fact that when we listen to a Yoruba program on radio Nigeria today or any of the Nigerian radio stations, the amounts of new Yoruba words that is mobilized to express. I mean, it's just fascinating the fact that these Yoruba presenters are actually not like producers, and the way they produce knowledge is so fascinating. It's not because they're not only shaping the ways people speak the language, the way they speak is also a function of what people say on a daily basis. The dexterity, the amount of the way they mobilize on different variations or variants of speaking the language itself is so interesting. I think we should have conversation with people like radio presenters. I think it should be nice for us next time if Kuala is going to do this or the British Library. It's nice to invite Yoruba radio presenters to ask them specific questions about how these new vocabularies are generated, and not just from by their own perspective, but for the past set of listeners who also shaped the way they communicate. And of course, to also be specific about the historicity of this, right? I mean, I would like to specifically mention Kola's dad when I was having discussion with him about my present research. That was when I got to know that he was a presenter at WNBC, and it was during the course of anchoring programs that got interested in Yoruba performance culture and was inviting all these performers and drummers to the studio to perform. The point in emphasis is that the history of this transformation in our radio shapes, the radio program shapes, public usage of language is very important. So when we talk about contemporary producers of programs on the radio, we should also be careful to understand it from the historical perspective, given the fact that this just did not evolve over time. I'm going to give another presentation because I think that the presentations we have today, including the contribution by Professor Karen Baba, they've done very good justice to this. I would like again to thank Kola, the British Library for doing this, and the presenters for this great, they are great presenters. I think it's a nice collaboration with the Lagos Tourism Association, and I look forward to further collaborations. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, Professor Said Arinto. And thank you everybody for for joining and attending. Like I said, we have so many more questions that we could have asked. But maybe tomorrow, I hope you'll be able to join the event tomorrow at the same time from 3pm. And I would just like to say thank you very much to all our panelists, Professor Olufemi Taiwo, Kola, Tu Basu, to Professor Karen Baba, and to Dr Tunde. And there we are. Very, very interesting discussions we've had here. And I think, yeah, the point of this event was to start a conversation about how we can write Europe going forward, making it relevant in the digital age. So I hope most of you will be able to join at tomorrow's symposium again. Thank you very much. And just to say that this recording will be made available, in case anyone asks, on the British Library YouTube page. Okay. Thank you. I think Marianne wants to say something. She says no. But anyway, yes, thank you all so much for coming and attending. And it's been absolutely fascinating. And I look forward to seeing you all here and from tomorrow. Thank you. Thank you everyone. Okay. Thank you.