Jul. 1st, 2013 01:26 pm
Plural plurals, singular usage
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muckefuckI'm nearing the end of It's our turn to eat, Michela Wrong's account of anti-corruption crusader John Githongo's high-profile falling out with the staggeringly shameless regime of Mwai Kibaki. When I finish, I'll have more to say about the content, but for a moment I just want to talk briefly about how she handles the Swahili loanwords which pepper her account.
To review: Swahili, like all Bantu languages, has a robust system of noun classes expressed by means of prefixes. Count nouns tend to have distinct prefixes for singular and plural, e.g. mtu "person", pl. watu (the Swahili equivalent of bantu). This sort of alternation is naturally confusing for those accustomed to the suffixal pluralisation of European languages, so, when using Bantu nouns in an English context, an author has basically four options when it comes to the choice of plural form:
Wrong, being a journalist, is frequently quoting local sources, which I assume is what accounts for the apparent inconsistencies in the text (although to be fair I should also point out that I'm reading an uncorrected proof). In her own usage, she seems to prefer using Bantu singular and plural forms, supplying glosses when necessary to make the connexion clear to the reader. This is similar to what I found in Ngũgĩ's writing (though he resorts to (4), e.g. ahois[*] "beggars") and is what feels most natural to me. Vassanji, on the other hand, frequently--though not uniformly--favoured option (1). To be more precise, he used it consistently with some words (notably mzungu "gringo") and not at all with others.
Wrong does have to resort to a version of (1), however, in a context where she wants to use mzungu as an adjective. In Swahili, the most common way to derive an adjective from a noun of nationality is to use the Class 7 prefix, i.e. kizungu. (This is also how language names are derived, e.g. Mdachi "a German", Kidachi "German language".) But the connexion between kizungu and mzungu is unintuitive to the uninitiated and explaining it isn't worth the trouble for a nonce usage.
[*] A Gikuyu word, thus the animate human plural prefix a- rather than wa-.
To review: Swahili, like all Bantu languages, has a robust system of noun classes expressed by means of prefixes. Count nouns tend to have distinct prefixes for singular and plural, e.g. mtu "person", pl. watu (the Swahili equivalent of bantu). This sort of alternation is naturally confusing for those accustomed to the suffixal pluralisation of European languages, so, when using Bantu nouns in an English context, an author has basically four options when it comes to the choice of plural form:
- No plural. [That is, Bantu singular form is treated as an invariable English plural, cf. deer.]
- English plural only.
- Bantu plural only.
- Double plural (both Bantu and English)
Wrong, being a journalist, is frequently quoting local sources, which I assume is what accounts for the apparent inconsistencies in the text (although to be fair I should also point out that I'm reading an uncorrected proof). In her own usage, she seems to prefer using Bantu singular and plural forms, supplying glosses when necessary to make the connexion clear to the reader. This is similar to what I found in Ngũgĩ's writing (though he resorts to (4), e.g. ahois[*] "beggars") and is what feels most natural to me. Vassanji, on the other hand, frequently--though not uniformly--favoured option (1). To be more precise, he used it consistently with some words (notably mzungu "gringo") and not at all with others.
Wrong does have to resort to a version of (1), however, in a context where she wants to use mzungu as an adjective. In Swahili, the most common way to derive an adjective from a noun of nationality is to use the Class 7 prefix, i.e. kizungu. (This is also how language names are derived, e.g. Mdachi "a German", Kidachi "German language".) But the connexion between kizungu and mzungu is unintuitive to the uninitiated and explaining it isn't worth the trouble for a nonce usage.
[*] A Gikuyu word, thus the animate human plural prefix a- rather than wa-.
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