Sajini,

Ni ndona tungitwarana nawe ndigiona mundu wa kunjuria atiri "nuu uyu muthiaga nake utagutonyaga ndugira?" .

Let me ask you, who are the so called English men (women). Are they the inhabitas of England, or the inhabitas of Anglo Saxon? another one that i would like to know is whether England currently inhabited by Germanic tribes or Britanic tribes.

Riara,
Uma ni ati uugi uumaga kirira-ini, na kirira giaku ni kiega muno makiria. Niamu niwanduta maundu meeru. Kiuria giaku ni ngocokia thaa icio ingi, kana ruciu.

quote:

Originally posted by Riara Wa Kariara:
Sajini,

Ni ndona tungitwarana nawe ndigiona mundu wa kunjuria atiri "nuu uyu muthiaga nake utagutonyaga ndugira?" .

Let me ask you, who are the so called English men (women). Are they the inhabitas of England, or the inhabitas of Anglo Saxon? another one that i would like to know is whether England currently inhabited by Germanic tribes or Britanic tribes.

Riara,
Let me give my opinion on this. The English men to me are peopel who inhabitted England after the Anglo-Saxon conquest, not the inhabitants of Anglo-Saxon. You see, every human group has an ability to come together and negotiate their own identity whuich is different from prior identities. But there is a dilemma here, the categorial term 'English' and 'England' came into effect only after the Anglo-Saxon invasion. However, the Anglo-Saxon were not English until after the cultural misciegenation, which you call hybridity. Since hybridity involved the creation of a totally new compound that mergets elements from the cultures in contact, what comes up is neither the old constructy or the new one.

As far as England is concerned, I would say that it is inhabbited by teh Germanic tribes, since as you know, the remnants of the Britanic tribes live as a minority in France underthe identity Bretton. Interesting yeah?, unless of course you talk about the Celtics which is a metacategory including the Welsh, Irish, Cornish, Scotch Gaelic, etc. And their history and geographical distribution is too vast to restrict them to England alone.

Sajini

Thanks for your answer, now let me ask you another question. Who are the Waswahili? Is it those, who claim that their mother tongue (oh!, is there a father tongue) is Kiswahili or the natives who used to speak kingozi?

Riara,
I think swahili is a product of many defferent laguages ,a good example is the word swahili which we are told its an arabic word for coast.

the word meza is a portuguis word for table and also mahindi so swahili is a laguage formed after borrowing from other deferent laguages.

Wagithuri,
My contention is that linguistic borrowing, a common phenomenon in all world languages, is not equal to linguistic composition. Take Japanese for instance, there are thousand of English borrowings, and nobody claims that its authenticity has been dented, or English which borrowed heavily from French after the Normady conquest, nobody makes a big issue out of it.

I doubt whether Swahili borrowed more than 20 words from Portuguese even after three centuries of occupation. As for Arabic borrowing, it is important to note that a large number of borrowed words are cultural terms, which makes sense because Arabs brought Islam, and Arabic culture which was alien to the Waswahili.

Come to think of it, of what use would all the 99 named for God such as Allah, Rabukka, Mola, al Rahim, al Rahmani, Jalia, Jalali, Al Karim, Manani etc mean to the Waswahili who by then were not Muslims? The name Mungu simply encompassed all their religious beliefs.

I am not trying to deny the place of borrowing in Swahili, but the authenticity of Swahili language and culture, before the coming of the Arabs(though referred by a differnt name), and other foreigners needs to be accepted.

Riara,
If you go to Fort Jesus, you might be lucky to encounter a Sahili poet and scholar called Sheikh Ahmed Nabhany. According to him, and other Swahili writers like Mazrui and Mazrui, Abdalla Khalid agree with him, today's concept Waswahili has three hierarchies. 1. A person whose Ancestor are the Waswahili 2) A person born in Uswahilini, that is the place where Swahili is the predominant culture and 3) the naturalized Swahili, who have chosen to learn Swahili and adopt its culture.

As we know, a vast majority of the Waswahili today fall into the third category.

By the way, did you know that in Tanzania speak, all the black people are referred to as Waswahili?

Do you also know that Waswahili also has the connotation of swiddlers, liars, conmen?

Weee tiga uthweri waku!

Thanks Sajini for enlightening us.

Ndukarehe Githweli kiingi. In Uganda, our brothers and sisters, goes further to refer the twilight girls as Waswahili.

How about this new language we call sheng. Do we expect to have a sheng culture in future? Will there be people called washengi? How do we harmonize all the various varieties of sheng? Or this is not important at this stage since the evolution of the language is still at the peak? Is it possible to learn sheng grammer?

Why am interested in the development of sheng, is because of its uniqueness among our languages. It is one language that can incorporate science without any major impediment. Incorporating science has been one of our major barrier in promoting our languages. It has proved a mammoth task to translate scientific books into local language and thing with the advancement of sheng, we will have broken this barrier.

Breaking this barrier is very important for our technological and academic development. Let me give you an example. One day, I attended a meeting in Arusha Tanzania, and one Tanzanian told us to go slow for their sake. He said that, they (Tanzanians) have to think in mother tongue, translate that into Swahili and then interpret the idea in English, before they can contribute to the discussion. Because of this language barrier, the Kenyans and Ugandans were taking the show and it was not easy for the Tanzanians to effectively negotiate. If we look at the Asian countries, they have managed to incorporate the scientific language into their languages. I am not very sure whether our dear brothers in Ethiopia are as fortunate as the Asians. It is a known fact that, when one is taught in his/her mother tongue, (or father tongue/ parent tongue to be gender sensitive) the rate of assimilation is very high. The fact that our education system is based on foreign languages as the bases of instruction has been a major draw back to our academic development. How many student drops out of school just because they are poor in English? For one to master another subject, it is foremost to master English as a subject. I remember with a lot of sorrow, a kid in standard two who was asked in an exam, what we get from a cow. The kid answered that we get porridge. As we all know, we get milk from the cow. I was lucky to have met this kid the same day he got his exam results. I went through the paper and I asked him all the questions that he had failed. Fortunately for him, I asked all these questions in Kikuyu and he fantastically answered all of the correctly. Despite that the fact that, this kid knew all the answers, he had only managed 30%. What a pity?

Riara,
It is understandable why our brothers in Uganda would refer to the prostitutes as Waswahili. Even Ngugi wa thiong'o mention the Waswahili in 'Petals of Blood'. We also know that Majengo in Nairobi, a predominantly Swahili estate is associated with prostitution. Dont you see a pattern here?

Since the WaSwahili were the first people to have had contact with the British, they no doubt got initiated into the money economy quite early. And they followed the money train with all its attendant decadence. It is similar to the way other Kenyans view the Kabete girls. Early initiation into the money economy, proximity to the country's economic center, urbanizaion, and need to 'service' men who left their wives at home in pursuit for the urban dream, the poor girls' struggle to make ends meet when modern economy denies them the opportunity to make an honest living, criminal elements who drive these girls into flesh peddling trade, ad infinitum. It just becomes hard to codemn them.

Back to the linguistic connection, my hypothesis is that the twilight girls might have used Swahili as a language of negotiating with customers who come from different ethnic groups. Of what use is Luganda when the Acholi clients come calling? And let us not forget that in spite of our admiration of Ugandans' mastery of the Queen's English, it is still a language of the literati who are a minority. Is it not easier to learn and transact business in Swahili intead of learning all other languages, which in any case would be impossible?

Turning to Sheng. Let me confess that in spite of my love for Standard Swahili, I consider Sheng as a very postive development. By the way, no language is without grammar. Adherence to the rules of grammar what makes it possible to conduct coherent discourse. A language without grammar cannot be understood, nor learnt. In Sheng's case, it is built on Swahili grammar, though sometimes there is a slight variation from Standard Swahili.

There is no need to harmonize different varieties of Sheng since they evolved from different social situations. So long as different speakers of Sheng inhabit different social settings, the differences will always be there. Again this is not negative. Instead, it ireflects the dynamism of a language which is ready to adapt to different circumstances. If you are a competent Sheng speaker, you will not experience any problems with other Sheng varieties. The only reason we notice vast differences in Sheng varieties is becuase our knowledge is superficial. Yes, your Sheng variety will mark you as an outsider if you don't speak the local variety, but you can only suffer minimal intelligibility setback which is unavoidable.

Already, sheng has its own culture, only that is has mostly been confined to the non-mainstream arena. But it is slowly breaking this jinx and once it cast down the stigma, it will play a very important part in our lives. It has already started.

We do not have to call ourselves 'Washeng'i on account of speaking Sheng. Take an example of Papua New Guinea. those guys developed a pidgin called Tok Pisin 'Pidgin talk' and now it is the national language. Yet, the New Guineans are not called Tok Pisinians. Pesonally, I would not consider it a defficiency if the Sheng speakers are referred by a totally different name.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: sajini,