The language Fon, or Fongbe in Fon, is spoken by roughly two thirds of the Beninese population. I was told it would be easy to learn, verbs are practically not conjugated, and friends had given me a language book as a goodbye present, so I decided to give it a go. I have to admit that it is far more difficult than thought.
By now I have learned 219 words.
This language is full of suffixes and particles referring to the finest nuances of intention, direction, time, and so on and so forth. Another difficulty is that the Fon vocabulary is limited. Words are mostly monosyllabic, and they are distinguished by their intonation. In the vocabulary given in the Web, I counted 24 times “nu”, with meanings so different as “beneficiary”, “mouth”, “as soon as”, and something resembling the French word “truc”.
Few words have more than one syllable, and these are mostly composed from monosyllabics. Take the word for “owner”: it is put together from “nu” (the “truc” mentioned above) and “no”, a suffix indicating an owner (but not to confuse with “mom”, “stay” or the marker for repeated actions). A specialist, on the other hand, is a “to”; “da-bla-to” (hair-plait-specialist) is the hairdresser for women, or plaiter, while “da-kpa-to” (hair-cut-specialist) is the one who treats the men. “Xo-jla-to” (word-spread-specialist) is the journalist, “mawu-xo-jla-to” is the specialist to spread God’s word or priest, God’s own journalist so to speak.
At this point I would like you to recall that Mawu is the highest god in the Voodoo religion, the one that always goes together with Lissa and has no image. Very good catholics will refer to God rather as “gbe-do-to” (life/world/nature-have-specialist), or the master of all things.
By intelligent combinations, the Fon can express any entity, phenomenon or concept, however abstract it may be. “Du”, for example, means to eat. You cannot just “eat”, you always have to eat something: “du nu” (the “truc”), or “du kwékwé” (bananas), or any other edible thing. But you also can eat a dance (“du we”= dance; but not to confuse with „we“, the particle for ongoing actions: “un do we du we“ means „I am dancing“), or even life (“du gbe”= enjoy). It is obvious, the Beninese love eating, and you can see the result everywhere in the street.
If this brief overview has sparked your curiosity, you can look up the website http://www.langues-africaines.com/FONGBE/index.htm. I unfortunately will have to interrupt my stay in Benin and come back to Brussels for a few days. As a goodbye, I would like to show you Cotonou at night – beautiful, isn’t it.