Ọ̀rọ̀:Èdè Yorùbá

ki lon seleKehinde Ojo

Problems

Eng: For context, I'm new to wikipedia as far as editing, I've only written a few captions and summaries for the yoruba and potentially english (i don't recall) wikipedias, so I haven't edited it out of caution. However, I'm ethnically yoruba/nigerian, was born & lived in the country for the first 13 years of my life when I lived fully immersed in the language at home and in Yoruba classes at school. I'm no longer as immersed but I am taking a yoruba anthropology class at the moment.

Reading this article was a struggle. It does take me a second to remember the tones if I've not read in a while and I'd say my yoruba is maybe at the bottom of average (compared to nigerians in nigeria) but even with all of that taken into account, this is beyond the norm of difficulty. The sentences are constructed so strangely and are weirdly convoluted, and the sections are disconnected from each other -- half of them aren't even about the language! There's a whole paragraph about how it's rude to say (fuzzy translation) 'how's it going' to an older person which could be valuable if it was framed in terms of the embeddedness of hierarchy in the language and made reference to other expressions that are age-coded (like the pronouns for example or certain titles) but its just random and not even related to the heading its under.

This raises some questions about the editorial policy of the yoruba wikipedia, like how are tensions between dialects resolved? Especially since some of them are really quite far apart in the accessibility of understanding for the average speaker (in my experience). I've also noticed some potential problems of words that don't really 'exist' in yoruba (say 'jailbreak' or entomology), the approach tends to either be to yoruba-cise the spelling or to make up a word that describes the english meaning. The trouble being that while words are constructed like in german ie by adding base words together, I suspect its closer to Chinese in the sense that base words don't have more contextual than precise meanings so just adding base words (that have different meanings based on context) isnt always enough to create a new word that will be immediately understandable to a native speaker.

These are difficult questions so before I attempt to 'fix' anything I want to understand the policy so I don't just make things worse. I want to contribute more since it's kinda sad how small the yoruba wikipedia is.

Yor: Mi mo b'oya o ye ki'n ti ko nnkan ti mo so l'oke ni ede yoruba, mo kan tete lo ede oyinbo. Ti ofin ba wa l'ori ede l'ilo e'jo e kan je ki'n mo, maa tun ko. E se, alaafia si o. (e de ma binu mii ti ni awon ami to ye ki'n lo l'ori awon alifabeeti yi.) Mjolke (ọ̀rọ̀) 06:16, 7 Oṣù Agẹmọ 2025 (UTC)