Have you ever danced in the night?

When I arrived at my house in Bambili it was almost dark and as always in places close to the equator the sun sets fast and within a little while, places were dark. There was no electricity that night and my neighbours had already closed their doors for the night. All I could hear was the sound of the African night, the mixed sounds of crickets and frogs. Bambili is situated in the hills and highlands of northwestern Cameroon and the nights can become quite cold and the houses easily feel chilly and mouldy because of the high humidity. The smell is distinctive. In the room with my boxes, the few belongings I had, two suitcases from Sweden and then some kitchen utensils I had packed and kept before I left Cameroon the year before. I sat down on the cold tiled floor and fear wanted to get a hold on me. Loneliness, as if no one knew where I was and what I was going through. In that moment I remember I stood up, and instead of looking for a blanket or something warm to wrap around me I decided to find my loudspeakers and find my laptop and turn on the music. Right there I did my first dance performance in Bambili. I danced away fear and doubt and let joy and confidence along with faith fill my heart. My circumstances didn't change, the night was still dark outside and only God knew exactly what I was going through but I had learnt one of life's most important lessons, I learned to dance in the night.

Tone language, na weti?

And Change said "Let the consonants guarding the vowel to the left and the right contribute some of their phonetic features to the vowel in the name of selfless inter segmental love, even if the consonants thereby be themselves diminished and lose some of their own substance. For their decay or loss will be the sacrifice through which Tone will be brought into the world, that linguists in some future time may rejoice (Matisoff 1973a, 73)"

I'm working on a tone language. And as I am trying to write out rules how these tones work in Baa I came across this citation I thought worth sharing with you. 

Most languages of the world are actually tone languages. They use not only consonants and vowels but also tone as a contrastive feature in lexical meaning. Yes, so we all know languages like Chinese are tonal and for me whose native language is not very tonal, Swedish, it just seems like a jungle of impossibilities to understand or learn to even speak a tonal language. (Swedish has accent 1 and accent 2 as they call it. So we would have tonal melodies over words, but not assigned to syllables like in real tone languages.)

As most features in language, there are rules, and also irregularities. Tones can be a lot of fun, that is if you don't have to write a chapter about it and have a consistent analysis all through your grammar. It teaches us some interesting things about human language. And is it difficult? Well, not necessarily more difficult than other features of language. Some say that parents who speak a tonal language can easily understand their toddlers before they can even speak because the first things children learn is what? Melody. Be it intonation, or tone.

In Africa, and I am sure also in other parts of the world, there are drums, so called talking drums that can be used to communicate past far distances. In the past, used during war, announce a visitor, or maybe the birth of a prince. In other parts of the world, people whistle their sentences and the message gets through. 

I should give you a tutorial on Baa tone one day. Right now I'm pondering on how a to describe why a tone spread in one word, a prefix-verb context, and not in a compound noun.  Different rules apply and I need to get them straight. That is if I have got the labeling of melodies clear in the first place. Not to confuse you more I suggest you learn this phrase from Yoruba, another tone language of Nigeria. Want to know the meaning and many other useful phrases in Yoruba? Check the whole youtube video here.

What are you doing in life?

It's a great phrase to know in French 'Qu-est ce que tu fait dans la vie?', fits well with most  aliens you come across. But in as much as we are interested in others and try to be friendly, to be honest isn't this a reflection of how we compare one another? By putting labels and titles we can group people and ourselves easily on the scale of success.

I'm a linguist in training, I love what I get to do, work with exotic languages and learn lots of things everyday. And the people I work with who appreciate the things I do when I try to figure out how their language works, they just wonder why it takes so long to write a thesis. So to be honest, I don't think I'm the best at it, it is not well paid, I had to put up with Malaria and Typhoid last time I was working in Lagos. No, it is not the most comfortable thing I could do in life. And while there must be many others, smarter than me out there, they didn't  take the chance, maybe they never got it. Well I did get the chance and I took it.

Today my supervisor asked me what my plans are after having finished my PhD. My answer; plan 1) survive this PhD, 2) secure myself a house somewhere on the continent of Africa 3) live happily ever after. I should probably have said something but I ended up just smiling and I guess he wouldn't understand anyway if I told him my plans. I think if you really want to know someone better, don't just ask what they are doing, but rather why they are doing what they are doing.