Saturday, August 7, 2010

Perhaps a club called ‘Yatch’ was put up in my absence

By PHILIP OCHIENG

According to the Standard, the President and the Prime Minister met somewhere in Kisumu called “the Yatch Club”. Never heard of it! Until recently, I never visited Kisumu for 10 years.

Perhaps a club called “Yatch” was set up there at a point during that time. But, every time I visit the lakeside metropolis, I pay homage to Hippo Point.

For it recalls happy moments in 1968, when I played a central role in a resplendent cultural festival organised by Okot p’Bitek, the bewitching Ugandan story-teller.

Imagine the romance of it! Marjorie Oludhe-Macgoye — the Cornish girl who became Luo by association and has some sublime poetry to show for it — reminisces with nostalgia that, just off Hippo Point, the belly of a steamship was our idea of a day-long poetry recital session.

Revisiting Hippo Point two weeks ago was a considerable letdown. To be sure, the “ripples in the pond” that the Luo call Nam Lolwe — “water that stretches as far as the eyes can see” — were still enthralling.

But I saw no more steamer, leave alone mutbot (which was how our Luo tongue could render any of the motorboats that used to ferry me (on my way by rail from Alliance) from Kisumu to Kendu Bay. That is what makes the question so stark.

Without such vessels, what can be the point of any sailors’ club? For it appears that such an association was what the Standard reporter had in mind.

Did he mean to say that Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga had met at the Yacht Club? But, clearly, a yacht (a kind of boat) is a far cry from a yatch (whatever that is).

Please note the spelling difference. In the correct name, the “ch” comes before the “t”. The mistake stems, then, from the perennial failure by East African users of the English language to notice that “yacht” does not belong to the same category as batch, catch, hatch, latch, match, patch and such other words in which the “t” precedes the “ch”.

That is what misleads East Africans into pronouncing “yacht” identically with the Luo verb yach (“to be heavy with child”, “to be pregnant”).

Wrong! Yacht is pronounced more like eyot (“a river island”), but with the “e” silent, or “yot”, the pronunciation of jot, the German word for the letter “j”.

Do not forget that “j” is only an elongated form of “i”, the letter which the Greeks of classical antiquity called iota (pronounced yota).

It is because the related letter “y” is composed of a double “i” that the French call it “i-Grec” (“Greek ‘i’”). In short, an “i-Grec” has two iotas.

Of Nilo-Semitic in root, iota originally meant “the smallest possible amount”. Iota then went into Latin as jota (a small note) and is what has spawned the German noun jot and the English verb “to jot (down)”.

To jot, then, means to pen an “i”, that is, to put down the alphabet’s smallest character — a long way from a yacht.

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