Tag Archives: Languages of Wilder Confusion

Languages of Wilder Confusion: Win

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Would you encourage Christians to want to win people for Christ? Yes! Would you suggest they fight and kill them to do this? What?!! And yet that could very easily be a conclusion people reach. How?

Well in Nigerian English people use ‘win’ where British English uses ‘defeat’.

School exercise book with the slogan: Education is the only tool to win all the violence
Education is the only tool to win all the violence

Source 1: Sunday school ‘this small group of Israelites were going to win the bad bad people’. (about Gideon)
Source 2: Education is the only tool to win all the violence.

(I wonder how the book “How to win friends and influence people” goes down.)

It’s not that one meaning for ‘win’ is right, but if we don’t recognise the differences then it’s a recipe for silent disaster; we may not notice any misunderstanding has happened.

(You should perhaps read Languages of Wilder Confusion)

Languages of Wilder Confusion

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Most people around the world speak more than one language.

That shouldn’t be news, but in the English-speaking monolingual world, we may need to remind ourselves of this fact.

One language may be used at home and informally, but in a multilingual world, it’s useful to be able to communicate with people who speak different languages. People with different home languages might share a common language or a ‘trade language’ (especially for the marketplace). These are known as ‘languages of wider communication’. English is obviously one, and so is Hausa (used in northern Nigeria), Mandarin Chinese (for China), Spanish etc. Unfortunately while I can greet people and buy my tomatoes using Hausa, when I try to go much deeper in the language I come up against a problem. Any Language of Wider Communication is also frequently a Language of Wilder Confusion.

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Languages of Wilder Confusion: Of Step Mothers and Aunts

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One of the Koro Ashɛ translators sadly just heard he lost his step-mother. I offered my condolences and (I really should know better by now than to do this, but) I asked somewhat crassly when she had become his step-mother.

At that point he looked confused.

But of course, I’d asked a silly question. I was thinking that perhaps his mother had died and his father remarried, but no, I was quite off-beam. This was his father’s immediate brother’s wife. All the wives of his uncles are called in Ashɛ-style English ‘step-mothers’, as are co-wives in polygamous households. I guess I would say ‘aunt’ but I get the impression that the relationships just work differently and a paternal aunt by marriage is quite a different thing from a maternal aunt or even a father’s sister.