Omolaye 2023 as a Source for Yorùbá Folktale

Four tales in this section come from a single open-access article: Bamidele Omolaye, "Aesthetics and Utilitarian Essence of Selected Yorùbá Folktales," published in Accelerando: Belgrade Journal of Music and Dance in 2023 1. Omolaye is in the Department of Music at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ifẹ̀.

It is the most valuable source in this section by a considerable margin, and it has one defect that shapes every quotation drawn from it.

Why it is the best source here

It names its informants. The article carries a table giving, for each tale, the informant's name, age, sex, town and date of collection: Pa. Oduremi Eluwole, 80, of Oke-Ola Modakeke, 12 March 2022; Elder Adeoye Olarewaju, 75, of Akodi-Aga, Ile-Ifẹ̀, 3 February 2022; Mr. Adisa Yusufu, 68, of Oke-Oniti, Oshogbo, 26 January 2022 1. Set against Ellis, who names nobody (alo-ellis-1894-as-a-source), and Ogumefu, who names nobody and states no method (alo-ogumefu-1929-as-a-source), this is the difference between a record and a book.

The depth contract this corpus works to requires naming the people who carry a tradition. For three of the tales in this section, that is possible, and it is possible because of this article.

It prints the songs in Yorùbá. The three Ìjàpá songs and the Olúrónbí song are given in Yorùbá with line-by-line English glosses. Almost nothing else available to this compiler does that. Ellis prints one Yorùbá refrain word across ten tales; Parkinson prints one untranslated line; Ogumefu prints none at all.

It treats the songs as music. Omolaye supplies staff-notation transcriptions and describes the musical setting: hemitonic pentatonic scale, compound duple metre, pitch set by the lead singer 1. He also classifies the songs by form, distinguishing strict call-and-response, where the lead calls a changing line and a group answers with fixed text, from solo-and-chorus antiphony 1. Three of the four tales use the first form and Olúrónbí the second. This is the kind of detail that makes yoruba-alo's account of àpagbè concrete rather than abstract.

It is peer-reviewed and open access. Received 28 November 2022, accepted 25 December 2022, published 23 February 2023 1.

It states what the tales are told for. For each tale Omolaye reports the intended lesson, which is a claim about pedagogical use rather than an analyst's reading imposed after the fact.

The defect

The article prints no subdots. Not one. There is no ẹ, no ọ and no ṣ anywhere in its Yorùbá text, as can be verified by searching the article. Grave and acute accents are present, so the tone marking is partially there, but the subdot layer of Yorùbá orthography, which distinguishes seven vowels from five and ṣ from s, is absent throughout.

This is a typesetting loss rather than a dialect feature or a transcription choice: the accents survived and the dots under the letters did not, which is the signature of a font or encoding failure somewhere between manuscript and publication.

What this corpus does about it. Nothing, deliberately. Every song from this source is reproduced exactly as printed, subdots absent, and flagged in the file where it appears. The rule stated in the corpus build note is that where a source prints Yorùbá without full diacritics, it is reproduced in that state and marked, because supplying the missing marks supplies a reading the source did not give.

The temptation to correct is real here, because in most cases the intended form is obvious to a Yorùbá reader: bé bè is plainly bẹ̀bẹ̀, tó se is plainly tó ṣe, omo rè is plainly ọmọ rẹ̀. But "plainly" is doing work that a compiler is not entitled to do silently, and a corpus that quietly upgrades its sources cannot be checked against them. Where the intended form is unambiguous, this section notes it in the literal gloss and says it is doing so.

A consequence worth stating: the literal glosses of Omolaye's songs in this section are the compiler's own, built on Omolaye's English, and carry medium confidence for that reason. He supplies translations, not word-by-word glosses.

What the article contains

Four tales, of which three are Ìjàpá tales:

• Ìjàpá àti Babaláwo, the fertility medicine tasted three times. alo-ijapa-and-the-babalawo
• Asín àti Òkéré, the shrew rat and squirrel, explaining the tortoise's nose. alo-why-the-tortoise-nose-is-small
• Ìjàpá àti Erin, the elephant lured to a false coronation. alo-ijapa-and-erin-the-false-coronation
• Olúrónbí àti Olúwéré, the vowed child. alo-oluronbi-and-the-iroko

One gap in the apparatus: the informant table is numbered 1, 2, 4, skipping 3, and gives informants only for the first three tales. No informant is recorded for Olúrónbí.

Its argument

The article's framing is that African folktales are being eroded by globalisation and should be digitised to preserve the indigenous knowledge system in them for future generations 1. Omolaye describes the traditional setting as moonlight storytelling, particularly in the harmattan season, with children gathering after the day's work, and argues that African children today are more familiar with foreign cartoons than with this material 1.

The corpus records this as the author's position. It is close to the account yoruba-alo gives of the genre's displacement, and the two agree on the facts; the recommendation that follows, digitisation, is Omolaye's own advocacy and is reported rather than endorsed.