Types of Word Junction in Yoruba

European students of Yoruba are usually slow in learning to understand the spoken language because, apart from having to grapple with the unfamiliar phenomenon of tone, they often find it difficult at first hearing to recognize in medial position words with which they have become quite familiar when occurring initially or finally. This is due to the frequent occurrence of junction situations where a word with vowel final 1 is in close syntactic relationship with a following word which, in its isolated form, has a vowel initial, resulting sometimes in the elision of one or other of the vowels in contact, sometimes in an assimilation of one vowel to the other, and sometimes in each vowel retaining its identity. The tones of the junction syllables may also be elided or modified. The European, with his literate approach to language study, is further handicapped by the anomalies of the accepted orthography, which in some cases indicates the junction phenomena and ignores them in others. An added complication is that in many Yoruba books it is hard to find two consecutive pages which are consistent in maintaining the same set of anomalies. This means that, while in some cases the orthography provides a sufficient clue to the pronunciation of a word, in other cases a word cannot be correctly pronounced without reference to the surrounding words and without a detailed knowledge of the usages of the language.