Learning to Fly Again

Learning to Fly Again: Igbo..

sugabelly:

elumeda:

Afuru m gi na anya -I love you (technically)

Afuru m gi na anya m - I saw you with my eyes

That 1 letter at the end makes a huge difference.

Actually it doesn’t. Sorry to be an Igbo grammar nazi but your grammar is wrong.

In Igbo when referring to body parts, there is NO…

LOL sorry what? Okay firstly, My mother of native Igbo heritage born and bred is the one who informed me of this. Secondly, there are many ways to imply ‘i love you’ to a person, and what I stated was one CORRECT version, alongside with what you had stated. To say ‘afurum gi nanya m’ obviously the person isn’t going to think “oh yeah she saw me in her eye” that my friend, is idiotic. By stating what I said, it still gets the meaning across and still makes sense.

I think we need more of a lesson on different versions to saying something.

Re the Igbo post. It doesn’t matter that your Mom is Igbo born and bred. With all due respect to your mother, LOTS (and I mean LOADS) of Igbo people who have been speaking Igbo all their lives speak grammatically incorrect Igbo. Why? Because there is no in depth study of Igbo grammar in school like there is of English and people think that because they grew up speaking it then what they are speaking must be correct. Nothing could be further from the truth.

2. Idiomatic expressions don’t confuse people who know how to speak a language properly. If you say “Afurum gi na anya” to someone and they think you are saying “I see you in my eye” instead of “I love you” then believe me that person DOES NOT know how to speak Igbo no matter how long they’ve been “speaking it”. You don’t modify idiomatic expressions to assist other people’s ignorance and lack of proper understanding of the language, they are FIXED expressions that have meaning that are NOT related to their LITERAL meaning.

Take the following expression for example:

The nail that sticks up will be hammered down.

Does this mean I am talking about an actual nail being hammered down? No it does not.

This is a common Japanese expression and what it IMPLIES is that people who are too individual in Japanese society will face consequences until they conform to the group behaviour.

Source: elumeda