[Ads-l] Antedating of "Kwanzaa"

[Laurence Horn]

And if anyone is wondering about the different spellings and the [sic]
after Kwanza above: the Swahili source is actually "kwanzaa", a trisyllabic
word usually translated as 'first fruits', and one that (like virtually all
Swahili words, including Harambee, /harambEe/) gets primary stress on the
penult, hence the second of the three /a/s.  So "Kwanza", with two
syllables and stress on the first syllable, is an accommodation.

--LH, who overlapped at UCLA with the founder, then known as Ron Karenga,
and who was born exactly four years before R./M.K.

On Wed, Dec 21, 2022 at 8:38 PM Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu> wrote:

> Kwanzaa (OED 1970)
>
> 1967 Harambee (Los Angeles newspaper) 28 Dec. 8 (Underground Newspaper
> Collection microfilm)
>
> KWANZA [sic] means first.  It is a traditional celebration that takes
> place in Africa on January 1. ... To celebrate this old African tradition,
> the Black community of Watts [is having] a BLACK CULTURAL BAZAAR from
> December 26 to January 2.
>
> NOTE: Harambee was a newspaper published by an organization headed by
> Maulana Karenga.  Karenga, the founder of the modern Kwanzaa holiday, has
> said that the earliest coverage of the holiday was in Harambee.  The
> citation above occurred in volume II, no. 2 of the newspaper.  The Kwanzaa
> holiday may have been mentioned in earlier issues of the paper, but there
> appear to be no earlier issues preserved in any library.
>
> Fred Shapiro
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

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