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I'm a Wikipedian (of sorts) and I don't think WP is that bad an encyclopedia. We've tightened up the system a bit and there seems to be less vandalism going on. Aha! People who dislike WP seem to think that every mistake there is consciously contributed by the most upright editors. That is simply not true. That it is open to any and all alike (barring vandals who are duly blocked from editing) should never be let out of sight. There are many articles that are in dire need of professional attention. Another thing is that WP is non-profit. One of my main complaints, as a Wikipedian, is that there is this general high-school mentality as contributors are constantly needing to be reminded to cite their sources, etc. Alot of this makes many WP articles look like rough-draft reports, which is a real shame. But, I have to say that WP is much more reliable than Urban Dictionary, which is about as lax as you can get with editing. (I apologise for all of this sounding like an advertisement!)
I always thought that “come by here” as the origin and meaning of “kumbaya” was a bit too simplistic. There's probably a phrase in one of the Niger-Kordofanian (or, if you insist, Niger-Congo) languages that means something significant and is expressed as “kumbaya”. The construction just seems too African not to mean something in some language (other than Gullah).
There's probably a phrase in one of the Niger-Kordofanian (or, if you insist, Niger-Congo) languages that means something significant and is expressed as “kumbaya”. The construction just seems too African not to mean something in some language (other than Gullah).
But that's just guesswork, right? There's no evidence for that.
Wordsmith said:
The construction just seems too African not to mean something in some language (other than Gullah).
I got involved in a very interesting translation project with a friend of mine. He was translating a play in which the government bureaucrat characters spoke in a sort of gibberish that no one could understand. In translating the play into English, we decided that it was important for the gibberish words words to sound like English, rather than some foreign-sounding gibberish. So I made up words like "premagnant" and "unrepugnable". They sure sound like English. (At least I thought so.)
John Cleese does a great recitation, written along the same lines by someone in the vaudeville era. It goes on and on, sounding for all the world like English, without one decipherable word available.
It's possible to concoct words by the thousands that seem to belong in a particular language. That one word sounds like something that might come from one of the many languages in a large region of Africa doesn't make much of a case.
I once heard an audio recording of the mime artist Marcel Marceau perform one of his other, little-known talents: speaking gibberish "in" (sounding like) a large number of languages - German, English, Italian, etc. I wish to goodness I still had that cassette tape (recorded off the CBC Radio in my native Montreal, I believe) - it was hilarious.
Monica, Catherine Tate does something similar in the last video on this page at Language Log.
contrazz said:
It's possible to concoct words by the thousands that seem to belong in a particular language.
Of course it is.
That one word sounds like something that might come from one of the many languages in a large region of Africa doesn't make much of a case.
It depends. I could make something up using only a given number¹ of syllables and it could mean something in (say) Chinese. Whether or not it makes perfect sense is immaterial. In order to emulate the “sound” of a particular language, one needs a knowledge (if only subconscious) of the phonology and morphology of the language in question.
“Premagnant” and “unrepugnable” sound like English words because they follow patterns of English. Such “gibberish” words could be given ad hoc definitions² or even etymologies, if desired.
My point is that, given a large enough body of on-the-spot vocabulary, words which seem to belong to one or another language or language family may indeed have some actual correspondences.
I have created an algorithm which produces mock-English text. At this point it it nigh impossible to generate a significant number of instantiations without one of them corresponding to an actual English word (all the while in keeping with English morphology). It is possible to do so if you take enough time, but there will certainly a good many words which resemble actual vocables in (say) English, with one different phoneme; ee.gg., “abfurd” vs. “absurd”, “gandrill” vs. “mandrill”, “volerate” vs. “tolerate”, etc.
Furthermore, if someone asks you why you think some gibberish you made up “sounds like English” it would be quite difficult not to draw parallels to actual English morphemes (as the pre- in “premagnant” and the un- and -able in “unrepugnable”). Don't get me wrong, I enjoy this art as much as (if not more than) anyone else; but, we need to realise that these limitations³ we are using can (and often do) mean things syntactically. That they may mean something should not discourage us in creating nonsense words. In fact, they should encourage us to think that someone listening might be able to make sense of what we are “saying”! 🙂
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¹In the case of Mandarin Chinese, 405 (with four varying tones).
²Lewis Carroll defined some of his own words and gave them legitimate-sounding etymologies.
³Affixes (pre-, suf-, and infixes), morphematic elements (e.g., -ed, -ing, -s, etc.), phonemes, etc.
And then we have words like “ausgezeichnet”. No one would be fooled into believing this word was English if they saw it. It doesn't look like English.
To a native speaker it doesn't pass the hearing test, either - even though the spoken phonemes are all common in English. Someone who didn't have a working knowledge of English, German, or Dutch (all Germanic) might well guess, from the sound, that it's an English word.
It seems to me that both the phoneme and morpheme examples would indicate that the ear can be be easily misled. So I'm not sure how predictive it's possible to be that “kumbaya” is from that language group. In fact, if I heard “kumbaya” in the context “kicked in the kumbaya” (seen on a tee-shirt) I might even think it was English. [kidding]
As it happens, my grandmother had a good working knowledge of Lonkundo, spoken in equatorial Congo - but I don't believe a member of the Niger-Kordofanian language group. I had some opportunities to hear her speak it. From that snippet of knowledge, I could believe "kumbaya" might belong there.
What this all boils down to, I think, is that - unless there are some unusual sounds (glottal stops?) or unusual phoneme combinations involved - it could be tricky to make a strong, narrow inference.
Lonkundo (a dialect of Lomongo) is indeed a Niger-Kordofanian language, and specifically a Niger-Congo language, and more specifically a Bantu language.
The phoneme [x] heard in Ausgezeichnet is not a native phoneme in English—any more. That is, it was present in Old English.
I'll admit the possibility that “kumbaya” is not an actual word in any Niger-Kordofanian language—albeit, it is slim. But even if it isn't, it could still be a construction in one of those languages. For example, it could be formed as follows: ku + mba + ya —or— kum + ba + ya, etc. It would just be interesting to know what it means in any language. After all, what if it is Lubwisi for “Let us not wage war!”
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