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.
Yorùbá is a tonal language with three level tones, high, mid, and low, and tone carries lexical meaning the way vowel or consonant choice does in English: two words can be spelled identically once tone marks are stripped and mean entirely different things. This corpus's 02-language/05-owe-proverbs.md documents the best-known case, iṣẹ́ (work) against ìṣẹ́ (poverty) in the proverb "work is the cure for poverty," where the cure and the disease differ by tone alone. This file collects seven further cases from Owomoyela's collection where tone, or the collision of near-homophones distinguished only by tone, is the entire mechanism of the proverb's wit, each documented with Owomoyela's own footnote explaining the pun so that nothing here is the compiler's inference.
Literal: À ń gbèjà jà we are defending jà, jà ní ta ní ń jà lẹ́hìnkùlé òun? jà asks who is fighting in his backyard?
Idiomatic: "We fight in defense of jà, and jà asks who is fighting in his back yard."
Meaning: Some people do not acknowledge or appreciate the favours done on their behalf.
Used when: Owomoyela's note: "Some people do not acknowledge or appreciate favors"
Notes: Owomoyela's footnote: "Note the play on the syllable jà, which as a word means 'fight' but is also part of the name [of the party being defended, treated here as a personified figure]" [S1, note 10]. The proverb personifies the syllable jà itself as an oblivious beneficiary of a fight fought in his name, a joke that depends on hearing the same syllable simultaneously as an ordinary verb (to fight) and as part of a name, which only works because Yorùbá tone and syllable structure permit that double duty.
Source: Owomoyela 657, with note 10.
Literal: (Compare full text at Owomoyela 664-665.) À rí bàrà lẹ́bàá odò we see a-watermelon by-the-riverbank, ta ní yó ràn wá lọ́wọ́ ká já a? who will help us harvest it?
Idiomatic: "[We see a] watermelon by the stream; who will help in harvesting it?"
Meaning: Recorded by Owomoyela as a variant of a neighbouring entry on shared but unclaimed opportunity or responsibility.
Used when: As a comment on a resource or task everyone notices but no one steps forward to claim.
Notes: Owomoyela's footnote: "The proverb features a play on the word bàrà, which is both the word for watermelon and an adjective describing an evasive course" [S1, note 13]. The pun works because the two senses of bàrà are distinguished by usage and tone rather than by any difference visible in casual transcription, and a hearer must supply the correct sense from context exactly as with the iṣẹ́/ìṣẹ́ case in 02-language/05-owe-proverbs.md.
Source: Owomoyela 665, with note 13.
Literal: A ta bàbà we sell guinea-corn, a fowó-o bàbà with the-guinea-corn-money ra baba we-redeem the-old-man.
Idiomatic: "We sell guinea corn, and with the copper coins we redeem the old man."
Meaning: With whatever resources one has, one pursues one's goals.
Used when: Owomoyela's note: "With what one has one seeks one's goals" A companion variant, entry 668, A ta bàbà a fowó-o bàbà ra bàbà, "We sell guinea corn, and with the guinea-corn money we buy guinea corn," reworks the same syllables to suggest instead that, for all one's effort, one's circumstances have not significantly changed .
Notes: Owomoyela's footnote is explicit that the saying is "more a play on the syllables ba-ba (as to both the different tones they can bear and their different meanings) than a real proverb," clarifying that bàbà means guinea corn and that owó-o-bàbà, literally "guinea-corn money," means copper coin, "because guinea corn is copper-colored" [S1, note 14]. Three distinct tonal shapes of the syllable pair ba-ba are in play across the two variants: bàbà (guinea corn), baba (old man, father), and the compound sense built from bàbà again for the copper-coloured coin; Owomoyela's own classification of the saying as closer to wordplay than to a proverb proper is itself worth preserving, since it shows him applying the òwe versus eébú/pun distinction discussed in file 90 to a borderline case.
Source: Owomoyela 667, with note 14; variant 668.
Literal: Àgbà mẹ́ta kì í ṣi èkùlù pè three-elders do-not mispronounce èkùlù; bí ọ̀kán bá ní "ekulu," if the-first says "ekulu," èkejì a ní "ekùlù," the-second says "ekùlù," kẹta a ní "èkùlù" the-third says "èkùlù."
Idiomatic: "Three elders will not mispronounce èkùlù; if the first says, 'ekulu,' the second will say, 'ekùlù,' but the third will say, 'èkùlù.'"
Meaning: Three heads are better than one; among a group of elders, someone will get a difficult matter exactly right.
Used when: Owomoyela's note: "Three heads are better than one"
Notes: This proverb is unusual in the collection for staging its tonal wordplay directly in the text itself rather than requiring a footnote to reveal it: the same three syllables, e-ku-lu, are given three times with three different tone patterns, moving from entirely toneless ("ekulu," the first elder's version, treated as an error) through a partially toned form to a fully and correctly toned rendering ("èkùlù") by the third elder. The proverb dramatises, as its whole content, the exact problem this corpus's translation rule exists to manage: that a Yorùbá word printed without tone marks is not simply "less precise" but potentially not yet the right word at all, and getting the tone right is treated here as the marker of genuine elder competence.
Source: Owomoyela 2858.
Literal: Èwo ni ìjà what is-the-problem nínú "Ògún dá rèké"? in "Ògún broke sugarcane"? Ṣé bí Ògúndárèké ló ni ìrèké-e rẹ̀? is-it-not-that Ògúndárèké owns his-sugarcane?
Idiomatic: "Where is the problem in 'Ògún dá rèké' [Ògún breaks sugarcane]? Is Ògúndárèké the owner of his sugarcane?"
Meaning: A statement that sounds provocative or blasphemous on its surface turns out to have an entirely innocent explanation once the underlying reference is understood.
Used when: Used to defuse an apparent controversy once its real, harmless basis is revealed.
Notes: Owomoyela's footnote lays out the mechanism in full: "The proverb is an elaborate pun. The statement 'Ògún dárèké' says that the god of iron has broken the cane. But since the shortened form of the name Ògúndárèké (which can be a person's name) is Ògún, one also says that the person Ògún[dárèké] has broken a cane. The proverb says Ògúndárèké is the owner of the sugarcane, in which case, when one says the god has broken the cane, there is no problem" [S1, note 5]. This pun turns not on tone alone but on the boundary between a full personal name and its contracted form colliding with the name of a major òrìṣà, Ògún (treated in 06-orisa/07-ogun.md); it is included in this file because the ambiguity is only resolvable by a listener who can parse where one word's boundary ends and another's tone pattern begins, the same skill tonal disambiguation requires.
Source: Owomoyela 4436, with note 5.
Literal: Ohun tí a wá lọ sí Ìparà the-thing one sought going-all-the-way-to Ìparà, a bá ní párá one finds it in-the-rafters.
Idiomatic: "What one sought all the way to Ìparà one finds in the rafters; one's problem is solved."
Meaning: One sometimes expends unnecessary effort in the quest for things that could have been had simply for the asking, or that were close at hand all along.
Used when: Owomoyela's note: "One sometimes expends unnecessary effort in the quest for things that one could have simply for the asking"
Notes: Owomoyela's footnote: "The proverb is based on the pun available from the repetition of the syllables párá in the name of the town, even though the accents differ. Ìparà is a Yorùbá town" [S1, note 9]. The town name Ìparà and the word párá, rafters, share the same consonant-vowel sequence but carry different tone patterns, and Owomoyela's careful phrase "even though the accents differ" is a direct acknowledgment that the pun works by near-rhyme across a tonal mismatch rather than by exact tonal identity, a subtler kind of tonal play than the true homophone-by-tone cases elsewhere in this file.
Source: Owomoyela 4087, with note 9.
Literal: Kì í ṣe ẹjọ́ ajá it-is-not the-dog's-fault: ẹni tó so ó ni ò só ọ̀ré whoever tied-it-up did-a-poor-job; ẹni tó só só ọ̀ré whoever did-a-good-job tying: okùn ni ò yí the-rope was-not sturdy; okùn-ún yí the-rope was-sturdy: orúkọ ajá ló rọ ajá tó fi ń já it-was-the-dog's-name that-shaped the-dog into breaking-loose.
Idiomatic: "The dog is not to blame: it was the person who tied it up that did a poor job; the person who tied it up did a good job: it was the rope that was brittle; the rope was not brittle: the dog was simply acting according to its name when it broke loose."
Meaning: Whatever the proximate explanation offered, the dog's own nature, encoded in its very name, is what actually explains its escape.
Used when: Owomoyela's note: "In spite of any preemptive efforts, a person will eventually show his or her true colors"
Notes: Owomoyela's footnote: "The pun is based on the fact that the word ajá (dog) is construed to mean 'one who breaks loose' (a-já)" [S1, note 37]. This is a direct etymological pun rather than a tonal-collision pun: ajá, the ordinary word for dog, is read as if built from the agentive prefix a- plus já, to break or snap, so that the animal's very name is treated as a prophecy of its behaviour. The proverb runs through three successive, increasingly implausible excuses (bad knot, bad rope) before landing on the name-etymology as the real explanation, a structure that stages the process of exhausting superficial causes to arrive at an essential one.
Source: Owomoyela 3824, with note 37.
Three distinct mechanisms are at work across these seven proverbs, and this corpus keeps them distinguished rather than lumping them together as "wordplay." Entries 1, 2, and 3 turn on true tonal collision, the same syllables carrying different meanings depending on tone alone, the mechanism 02-language/05-owe-proverbs.md documents for iṣẹ́/ìṣẹ́. Entry 4 is unique in the collection for staging that same tonal mechanism directly in its own text rather than requiring a footnote to explain it. Entries 5 and 7 turn on morphological or naming puns, a contracted personal name colliding with a god's name, and a folk etymology read into an ordinary word, mechanisms related to but distinct from tone as such. Entry 6 sits between the two, a near-rhyme across a genuine tonal mismatch that Owomoyela is careful to flag rather than overstate. Every case in this file is lost, or at minimum badly flattened, by an English rendering, which is the exact justification this corpus's translation rule gives for the literal-gloss layer required alongside every idiomatic translation.
The Yorùbá sound system and its three tones, with worked minimal pairs showing how pitch alone changes a word's meaning.
Four Yorùbá sayings Owomoyela identifies as riddles doing double duty as proverbs, alongside the genre theory that explains why òwe and àlọ́ (riddle) are treated as close kin in Yorùbá oral tradition.
Fifty-eight Yorùbá proverbs on character, presented with the original, a literal gloss, a named translation, and the situation each is spoken in.
Forty-eight Yorùbá proverbs on the ọmọlúàbí ideal, presented with the original, a literal gloss, a named translation, and the situation each is spoken in.
Sourced Yorùbá proverbs about telling the truth, the mechanics of lying and self-deception, and the value placed on a person whose word is reliable.
Forty-three Yorùbá proverbs on sùúrù, patience, presented with the original, a literal gloss, a named translation, and the situation each is spoken in.