`zebra'

[Diogo Almeida]

Ralf-Stefan Georg <Georg at home.ivm.de> wrote:

>For the alleged "Congolese" source, I can only throw in that some oblique
>sources accessible to me narrow this down to an unnamed language "from
>Angola", one source giving the language name of /Bunda/. However, I've been
>unable to locate this language so far, neither on the map, nor in one of the
>language lists for Bantu lgs. available to me. I suspect that this lg., if it
>exists, may be known by some alternative name to specialists.

As a Brazilian, I'm familiar with the word /Bunda/. In Brazilian
Portuguese, this is the common word for "buttock". The dictionary
gives /mbunda/, from the "Quimbundo" language as the etymology for
it. There is a great amount of words in Brazilian Portuguese that
comes from Bantu languages, due to the slaves that were brought from
Angola and Mozambique.

A /Bundo/ in Brazilian Portuguese is a member of the Bundo tribe of
Angola. The Bundo are a Bantu people. Their language is, according to
the dictionary, "Bundo", "Ambundo" or "Quimbundo".

In Comrie's "The World's Major Languages", there is a map on page
992, showing the Bantu-speaking area, in which we see "Kimbundu",
"Lunda" and "Umbundu", together with "Kongo", as four Bantu languages
geographicaly close to each other, on the region of Angola. Angola's
capital is Luanda (maybe there is something to do with, I don't
know).

Historically, the Portuguese were already in close contact with
Swahili-speaking people in the middle of the sixteenth century, when
they already had conquered Malindi (around 1505), which is in today's
Kenya, I think. There are borrowings from Portuguese in Swahili that
dates from that time (Comrie's "World Major Lgs" pg.1013). There was
a portuguese attack to the city of Aden in 1513 (Aden is in the
extreme south-west of the Arabic Peninsula, facing today's Somalia),
because they were trying to monopolize the commerce of the Red Sea.

It does not seem impossible that a borrowing from Amharic (if "zebra"
really comes from Amharic) could have happened at that time or even
before, maybe directly from Ahmaric, maybe via Swahili or Arabic. Or
even from one of the Bantu languages mentioned before, who would have
already borrowed it from Amharic via Swahili.

If "zebra" really comes from a Congolese language, be it one of the
mentioned above or be it one closely related to those, the
explanation is easier, since the Portuguese were already in contact
with people speaking those languages in the second half of the
fifteenth century (discovery of Congo's and Angola's coast between
1474-1485 by Diogo Cco; expedition on the Congo River in 1484).

Well, that's all the information I can give. I hope it helps.

Kind Regards,
Diogo Alvares de Azevedo e Almeida