fon is fun. for real.

First of all, I need to mention that today is my brother Matt's birthday. He's the only reason I'm even blogging today, since he set up my site and acts as my ever-ready tech support. So if you happen to see a really tall guy with a gorgeous wife and the cutest little blue-eyed, bald-headed baby in the world wandering around Toronto today, give him a high five. Because he made it through another year.

Now, on to the other excitement: I learned some more Fon today. Christine, a wonderful, quiet woman whose cheeks are deeply grooved with tribal markings, crochets fluidly while she teaches. My tongue stumbles, but she is patient, repeating the phrases over and over again until the mamas around the ward can understand my greetings.

I came back to my cabin after my shift was over and started poking around the internet, wondering if there was a Wikipedia article about the Fon language. (We all know how much I love my Wikipedia.) Imagine my sheer joy when I found this site. Contained in that little corner of the internet is enough to make a language-lover's heart pretty much explode on contact. There are vocabulary lists, grammar lessons, and even audio files for learning pronunciation. I was planning on trying to spell out what I learned today. Instead, I'm just going to link to the files, and you can hear for yourself.

We'll start with, Did you wake up well? (A standard greeting, used much like, How are you?) : A fon gangi a? The response is Eeen, un fon gangi.

From there, the greetings usually go on for a while, since West Africans never like to get straight to the point. After finding out if you've woken up well, you might be asked whether or not you've done something. This is a rather random question, but it's a nice space-filler, since, unless you're dead, the answer is most likely going to be yes! A blo kpede a? The answer isn't on the site, but it's just the same thing without the a at the end.

And it's not on the website, but I can now calm a crying baby using the Beninoise equivalents of the Liberian no ma now and sorry yeah? (Evo, evo and Dede, dede, respectively.)

I'm going to be spending a lot of time on that website in the future, learning how to talk to my patients, how to get into their lives just a little bit.

And let's be honest here; who doesn't want to learn a language where the word for star literally means child of the moon?