Some stories

Power outages

Probably once every two weeks or so, the power goes out. The outages usually in the evenings and they’re usually pretty short, like 15-45 minutes. Everyone just lights some candles and waits for it to come back on. The last time it went out, I was sitting in the living room playing Snake on my cell phone (my high score is currently 800. I can do better than that) when Danny came in, lit some candles, and asked me if I wanted to play, you guessed it, Monopoly. We sat and ate snacks while playing Monopoly Europe by candlelight. It was a hilariously American power outage.

Cell phone thief

I was walking home from school one afternoon when I picked up a “friend” (read: Senegalese guy who wanted to get my number). This guy told me that he went to UCAD and walked home to Grand Yoff every afternoon, which got me really annoyed because I’d already told him that I lived in Sacre Coeur and it would not be that far out of his way to walk to Grand Yoff via Sacre Coeur. I thought I was going to have this guy with me for the next 45 minutes, so I started getting a little colder and a little shorter in my responses to his questions, hoping that he would get the hint and leave me alone.

He was a stubborn one though, and as it turns out, I’m glad he was. As we were walking past the car rapide stop on Avenue Bourguiba, the car rapide guys started trying to hustle us on to the cars as usual. One of them had his hand on my backpack, which made me sort of nervous because my cell phone was in one of the mesh pockets on the side. The second he let me go, I put my hand in the pocket and sure enough, my phone was gone. I turned to my friend and said “Il a pris mon portable!” (He took my cell phone!) He asked me which guy and I said I wasn’t sure, but he chased down the guy he thought that it was and sure enough, he got my phone back for me. I was a lot nicer to him after that. Thanks again, El Hadj of Grand Yoff, student of Arabic.

Some random assorted facts about Wolof, for people interested in languages

You don’t have to conjugate verbs in Wolof. No matter the pronoun, no matter the tense, the verb is always the same. The only exception that I know of is for the imperative, which is really easy (just throw an “-al” on the end of the verb and you’re good) and, like, not a real tense anyway.

There are also no adjectives in Wolof. All adjectives are verbs. “Sonn” doesn’t mean “tired,” it means “to be tired.” “Baax” doesn’t mean “good,” it means “to be good.” I think that this means that the verb “to be” does not exist in Wolof. If it does, it would only be in the sense of affirming that one does in fact exist. There would be no way to fill in the blank in the sentence “I am _____ ” and still have a subject-verb-complement structure.

Unfortunately, while verbs and adjectives are a lot simpler than in French or English, pronouns and syntax are way trickier. Wolof is an emphatic language, which means that the pronouns conjugate and the syntax changes depending on what part of the thought you want to emphasize. I’ve learned different sets of pronouns for making simple statements (no emphasis), asking/responding to questions posed with question words (which emphasize the object), and asking/responding to yes/no questions (which emphasize I don’t know what), and I know there are like a dozen other sets that my class hasn’t gotten to yet. The pronouns also change depending on whether or not the verb you’re using is active (like “to dance”) or passive (like “to be named”) and whether or not you’re in the past or present tense. It is insanity.

Also, the pronunciation of Wolof vowels has to be frustratingly precise. If you hold a vowel too long or cut it too short, you run the risk of saying a completely different word. With any luck, you’ll only mangle the meaning of your sentence, as opposed to saying something totally obscene or insulting. Some examples of tricky pronunciation include:
Toog (to sit) and togg (to cook)
Soow (yogurt) and sow (urine)
Reer (dinner) and rèer (lost)
Géej (beach) and gejj (dry fish)
Xool (to look) and xol (heart)
Maangi (“I” for present tense passive verbs/past tense active verbs) and maangiy (“I” for present tense active verbs)

Wofol numbers are base five instead of base ten. “One, two, three, four, five” is “benn, ñaar, ñett, ñeent, juróom.” “Six, seven, eight nine” is “juróom benn, jeróom ñaar, juróom ñett, jeróom ñeent,” and “ten” is “fukk.” The number 28 would be “ñaar fukk ak jeróom ñett” (“ak” means “and”).

Needless to say, numbers can get a little confusing for Wolof outsiders. If the base five thing wasn’t already complicated enough, pure Wolof speakers bring it to a whole other level when it comes to money. The smallest denomination of Senegalese coin is 5-CFA, and when you ask someone what the price of something is, they give it to you in “coins” and not CFA. So if they the price is “ñett fukk” (40), they don’t mean 40 CFA, they mean 40 5-CFA coins, so 200 CFA all together. Thankfully, this is something that only really hard-core Wolof speakers do. City people will almost always give you numbers in French, even if you use Wolof to ask them the price.