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694 documents across 38 sections. Filter by section, reader level, confidence or tag.
The Yorùbá sound system and its three tones, with worked minimal pairs showing how pitch alone changes a word's meaning.
An analysis of the Yorùbá three-level register tone system, demonstrating through minimal pairs and grammatical operations why tone is an essential phonemic component rather than optional decoration.
How the hourglass pressure drum is built and why it can speak, how bàtá encodes speech differently and why scholars disagree about it, the Àyàn drumming lineages, and worked examples of drummed Yoruba with the acoustic measurements behind them.
How to read the diacritics and tone marks used throughout this corpus, with worked examples and links to audio resources.
What incantation is as a genre, the theory of language it assumes, why naming and etymology carry force in it, and the tonal and word-play devices it depends on. A description and analysis, not a manual.
Seven Yorùbá proverbs whose entire mechanism depends on tone distinguishing otherwise identical syllables, with Owomoyela's own footnotes explaining each pun and what an untoned or translated rendering necessarily loses.
In Yoruba, pitch is not accent, it is spelling. Three words can share every letter and differ only in tone, which is why stripping tone marks from a text is closer to deleting vowels than to dropping an accent mark.
How oríkì is built from independent units rather than narrative sequence, and the specific mechanisms, tonal, structural, and referential, that make it resist translation.