ENUANI PROVERBS: WINDOW ON ENUANI CULTURE [Atụtụ inu]

You could well nominate Enuani language for a world prize in terms of diversity. And your nominee just might win. Very few languages in the world can match Enuani in this respect.  Enuani language embraces a very rich diversity of sub-dialects, which differ from town to town and from hamlet to hamlet. Virtually every town or hamlet has its own distinguishable sub-dialect. As an example, let’s take the towns of Ukala-Okpuno, Onicha-Olona, and Akwukwu-Igbo. These three towns form a triangle, and each one shares a boundary with the other. This means that the distance from one town to the other is technically zero, and the distance of habitations from one to the other is a fraction of a mile. Yet, each of these three towns has its own distinguishable sub-dialect of Enuani. Similarly, contiguous towns like Ubulu-Ukwu, Ogwasi-Uku, Igbuzo (Ibusa) and Asaba each have their distinguishable sub-dialects. A keen listener can tell what town an Enuani person comes from simply by the spoken sub-dialect.

With such a rich diversity of sub-dialects, rendering pan-Enuani proverbs presents quite a challenge. Which sub-dialect do you use? What we have tried to do is to present the proverbs in an Enuani rendering that is intelligible to all Enuani persons, dispensing with the peculiar idiosyncrasies that occur in the various sub-dialects. The core meaning of each proverb occurs in all of Enuani, even though each town might render it in its own peculiar sub-dialect.

In Enuani speech, the vowel a is always in the short form as in Adam. But the vowels e, i, o, and u have both long and short forms. In addition, there are specific sounds in Enuani that are not normally encountered in English. These include gb as in agba (jaw); gw as in agwa (beans); kw as in akwa (cloth); kp as in akpa (bag); nw as in anwụ (sun); ny as in anya (eye).

Enuani language is tonal. A word spelt the same way can have several different meanings, depending on the emphasis placed or not placed on the respective syllables. The famous example is the four-letter word, a-k-w-a, which can mean cry (ákwá), cloth (ákwa), egg (akwá), or bed (akwa), depending on the pitch or tone of each of the two syllables.

Persons who desire to hear how the proverbs sound when rendered in Enuani language are encouraged to visit enuaniculture.com website.

Enuani was historically not a written language. It does not have an orthography of its own. The orthography used in this work has been modified from neighboring languages and dialects, especially Igbo, Yoruba and Edo (e.g. see The Official Igbo Orthography as recommended by the Onwu Committee in 1961). Generally, we have used a dot (the diacritic) under the vowel to indicate the short form of the vowel, while the long form does not have the dot. Nouns and pronouns are written as stand-alone words.

Tonality is indicated by using the back Grave accent mark (e.g. à) to indicate a low tone or pitch, and using the forward Acute accent mark (e.g. á) to indicate a high tone. If we look at the earlier example of a-k-w-a, when both vowels have the backward accent it is àkwà (bed); but when both vowels have the forward accent we get ákwá (cry). And so on for other words.

In this work, we have used the tonal accent marks sparingly. Using them for every word would be overwhelming. So we have used them only in situations where their absence would lead to ambiguity. In other cases, we hope that the context will indicate the meaning and guide the pronunciation. In casual writing, people sometimes ignore both the vowel dots and the tonal accent marks.

Strict linguists may spot errors here and there in the orthography that we have used, but we believe we have made ourselves sufficiently understood.