Languagle #89: Fulah
Munyal deefan hayre
"Patience can cook a stone."
What it means
With enough patience, even the impossible can be done: munyal, patience and self-control, can cook a stone soft. Munyal is one of the core virtues of pulaaku, the Fulani code of conduct.
How to say it
MOO-nyal DEH-fan HAI-reh
Double vowels are long, so deefan starts with a long eh. Ny is the ny in 'canyon'.
Word by word
- Munyal MOO-nyal: patience
- deefan DEH-fan: cooks
- hayre HAI-reh: a stone
Where it was found
A traditional Fula proverb. D. W. Arnott wrote about it in his 1957 study of Fulani proverbs and wordplay.
Similar sayings
- Hausa: Hakuri maganin duniya. Patience is the world's medicine. (Languagle #37)
How to recognise Fulah
Fula, or Fulah, is spoken across West Africa, and in the Latin alphabet it uses hooked letters: ɓ, ɗ and ƴ, along with ŋ. Double vowels and double consonants are common. It's also written in Adlam, a script invented in 1989 by two brothers in Guinea. Bambara uses ɛ and ɔ instead of the hooked letters.
About the Fulah language
Fula, also called Fulfulde or Pulaar, is an Atlantic language of the Niger-Congo family, spoken by over 30 million people across some twenty countries of West and Central Africa, from Senegal to Cameroon and Sudan, along the old routes of Fulani herders. It sorts its nouns into around twenty classes, far more than the two genders of French. It is written in the Latin and Arabic scripts, and since 1989 also in Adlam, an alphabet invented for it by two young brothers in Guinea.