Fifty kola nuts for a greeting

In 1913 a Hausa scholar recorded a marriage gift set aside for one thing, exchanging greetings. His pages say a lot about how we begin a conversation, and about what a talking machine would have to learn first.

Between 1907 and 1911, a Hausa scholar named Malam Shaihu filled hundreds of pages by hand. He wrote in Ajami, the Arabic script that Hausa has been written in for centuries, and he knew no English. He left a space between most of his words so that a reader could follow. In 1913 the pages were printed in Oxford in facsimile, with a transcription in Roman letters and an English translation beside them. They fill two volumes of tales, proverbs and customs.

One of the customs he describes is a marriage between a man and a woman who has been married before. It begins with a messenger. The man looks for "some old woman of sense" and sends her to call the woman to him. When she comes, the two of them greet each other, and the first thing he says is a question. Lafia? Is it well with you? Only after that does he tell her why he called.

Then come the gifts, and Malam Shaihu gives each one its name. Four thousand cowries and fifty kola nuts go to the women of the man's part of town. "This is called," the translation says, "the cowries for exchanging greetings." He wrote kurdin gaisua, which today we would spell kuɗin gaisuwa. Later, ten thousand cowries go into a basket with two fine cloths, and those are "the cowries for the food". The food had its gift, and so did the greetings. The man had to go out and find fifty kola nuts just for them.

The kola has a small history of its own. It is said that the Hausa word for it, goro, came to us through Kanuri, and probably from Songhay before that, the family of languages that Zarma belongs to. So the greeting gift carried a word our languages had already passed between them.

Malam Shaihu's animal stories greet just as carefully. One of them opens with the teller's call, "Gatanan, gatanan", and tells of a beetle who needs help thatching his roof. He goes to invite the cock. The cock asks whether he has told the cat, and warns him not to. The beetle says "To", all right, and walks straight to the cat's house. It goes on like this from the dog to the hyena, then the leopard, all the way to the lion. On the day of the work, each guest hails on arrival, and someone inside asks, "Wa ke salama?", who is hailing? The dog comes, and he and the beetle exchange greetings. The hyena comes, and they exchange greetings. When the leopard hails, the beetle tells the hyena, who is hiding in the house by now, that perhaps he has only come to greet him. It is not a gentle story. The cock, the cat, the dog and the hyena do not survive it. Even so, every guest hails before asking whose spears are stuck in the ground.

We still begin this way. In our languages a conversation opens with greetings, and the greetings are allowed to run across many exchanges before anyone comes to the reason for the visit. Nobody counts that as lost time. By the end of it, both people have settled who is speaking to whom, and each has given the other a little of the day.

Now machines want to talk with us too. Before one says anything useful, it has a lot to learn, and most of it comes before the answer.

Greeting comes first, and a machine would have to let it run without hurrying it along. In the beetle's yard, a machine that goes straight to business would be the guest who walks in without hailing.

Then it needs to know who it is talking to. In Hausa, "you" is kai to a man and ke to a woman, as the grammars set down. Even the small word for "it is" changes with the noun, so a cat is kyanwa ce and a dog is kare ne. When the man in 1913 tells the woman why he called her, the "you" he uses is the one for a woman. A machine cannot say "you" in Hausa until it knows who is there.

And then there is listening. While one person talks, the other says "to" and "eh" to show the words are arriving. Replies often begin before a sentence has ended. A system that waits for complete silence before it answers will keep coming in late.

At Namu we build speech AI so that people can use technology by speaking, in their own language, beginning with Hausa and then Zarma. Much of that work is learning how people really talk, greetings included.

On the printed page, Malam Shaihu's sentence about the greeting gift ends with kurdin gaisua ke nan, that is the greeting money. Then he goes on to the cloths and the basket.