Herewith another Languagehat Poll combined with a Languagehat Gripe. I was reading the latest article about ibogaine, which may or may not be a wonder drug, when it occurred to me to wonder about the etymology and pronunciation. I had always mentally said /ˈaɪboˌgeɪn/ (EYE-bo-gain; I use /o/ because I don’t reduce it as far as /ə/), but I didn’t remember if I’d heard that somewhere or just invented it. So I looked around and discovered that the etymology was (per AHD):
[French ibogaïne, from New Latin (Tabernanthē) iboga, species name of shrub in whose root it is found, probably ultimately from Ghetsogho (Bantu language of Gabon) ibogha; akin to boghaga, to cure.]
So far so good, and it even had a derivation within Tsogo. But I was appalled to see that the pronunciation given was (ĭ-bō′gə-ēn′, -ĭn). Had I been flagrantly mispronouncing it for years? I checked OED: “/ɪˈbəʊɡəiːn/ ib-OH-guh-een.” And M-W? “i-ˈbō-gə-ˌēn.” It wasn’t looking good — I was going to have to retrain my brain. But then I thought “let me check video clips and make sure,” and lo and behold, every one of them, even those with experts speaking, used my untutored version, EYE-bogain. So now I was pissed: the dictionaries were conspiring to hoodwink their users and try to get them to use their fake pronunciation! I turn to the Varied Reader — if you are familiar with the word, how do you say it? And have you heard anyone say it the dictionary-approved (and very unnatural) way (ih-BOH-guh-een)?
Rhymes with cocaine, rogaine, and champagne. (Quite a party!)
What if you pronounce cocaine etymologically, as CO-cuh-een?
for comparison, wikip allows either /ˈaɪbjuːproʊfɛn/ or /aɪbjuːˈproʊfən/, eye-bew-PROH-fən
I’m not familiar with Ibogaine, but seeing the lurking ‘g’ and darkest Africa, I might be led into an echo of ‘Igbo’.
for comparison, wikip allows either /ˈaɪbjuːproʊfɛn/ or /aɪbjuːˈproʊfən/, eye-bew-PROH-fən
Yeah, but those are both reasonable pronunciations, differing only in stress. If you were looking at “ibuprofen” that’s how you’d be likely to say it. I refuse to believe that an average English-speaker, looking at “ibogaine,” would say /ɪˈbəʊɡəiːn/ ib-OH-guh-een.
In French it’s apparently l’ibogaïne. Beware the diaresis! (But don’t let it affect pronunciation in English, I should think.)
Ukraine: spelled the same in English, French and German; syllable boundary usually respected in German, never in French, AFAIK never in English either.
-oid(e): syllable boundary respected in French (spelled with ï) and German, not in English.
Two clicks away from Tsogo is:
“Rimba (Irimba) is the speech variety of the Babongo-Rimba pygmies of Gabon. Generally considered a dialect of Punu, it may preserve a core of non-Bantu vocabulary, and so to be conservative should be considered unclassified.[1]”
I am rusty on Bantu pronunciations, but the ibogha plant name would be approximately ih-BOH-gha if memory serves.
Without knowing the etymology, I would also go for EYE-bogain though..
vaguely related digression – in re the amapiano post of some time back, it reminded me of how the S. African sports teams that were known as the Springboks or Bokke in apartheid, became the amaBokke once the teams were integrated.. see link from my name here.
Ukraine: spelled the same in English, French and German; syllable boundary usually respected in German,
I have frequently heard it pronounced with the ai as a diphthong by German speakers.
-oid(e): syllable boundary respected in French (spelled with ï) and German
Except in Polaroid, where in my experience it’s pronounced as a diphthong.
I don’t know anything about Tsogo*, but ibogha and boghaga look like they come from proto-Bantu *bʊ́k- “divine, cure”, cognate with Kusaal bʋk “divine”, bʋgʋr “abode of a spirit” and bʋgʋd “person who consults a diviner.”
The Kusaal root is easily reconstructable to proto-Oti-Volta, with cognates farther afield in “Gur”, like Kassem vʋ̀ “divine” (perfective vʋga), Chakali vʊ́g “shrine.”
* Per WALS, the only source seems to be Raponda-Walker, André. 1950. Essai de grammaire tsogo. Suppl. Bull. Institut d’Etudes Centrafricaines. Brazzaville: Institut d’Etudes Centrafricaines.
Not much out there on its closer relatives, either:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsogo_languages
I’ve never heard it spoken, I think, but would pronounce it EYE-bo-gain if left to my own devices (rhymes with cocaine). But I bring no linguistic expertise to this table.
Glottolog, which has more detailed bibliographies, lists as the only dictionary of the language an unpublished one by the same Raponda-Walker. His published book, Les Plantes utiles du Gabon, is where I would look.
All those cocaïne–caffeïne–proteïn words naturally merge the final two syllables in English, but that should give /ɪˈboʊɡeɪn/. I guess the analogy of ibuprofen is too strong to resist.