Ten annotated Haya word lists from Tanzania

283 Pages·2006·0.854 MB·English

by  Jouni F. Maho, Abdulaziz Lodhi

Table of contents
List of figures and tables ................................................................................. 6
Acknowledgements .......................................................................................... 7
INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................... 9
1. Preliminary remarks on informants and word lists .................................... 9
2. Our lexical reference data .......................................................................... 11
3. Analysing the informants’ responses ......................................................... 11
3.1 Non-intended/non-expected readings ................................................. 16
3.2 Non-recall of appropriate item ............................................................ 19
3.2.1 Blank entries ............................................................................. 19
3.2.2 Semantically close, but not quite right ...................................... 20
3.2.3 Potential “on-the-spot” creations .............................................. 21
3.3 Foreign-language (Swahili) influenced responses .............................. 22
3.3.1 Lexicosemantic influence from Swahili (and English) ............. 22
3.3.2 Haya word forms influenced by Swahili ................................... 27
3.3.3 Brief summary of Swahili influences ....................................... 28
3.4 Foreign-language (Swahili) interference ............................................ 29
3.4.1 What is Swahili interference (in the present context)? ............. 29
3.4.2 Hayaization of Swahili words ................................................... 36
3.4.3 Brief summary of Swahili interference in our data ................... 36
3.5 Individual characteristics of the informants ........................................ 37
3.5.1 Idiosyncratic spelling choices ................................................... 37
3.5.2 Idiosyncratic grammatical forms .............................................. 43
3.5.3 The informants’ ages ................................................................. 45
3.6 Certain list traits and their consequences ............................................ 47
3.6.1 Minor blunders in our word lists ............................................... 47
3.6.2 Responses molded in accordance with our list items ................ 49
3.6.3 “Selective reading”, or: ignoring English items in List B ......... 50
3.6.4 Differences between the two sets of responses ......................... 51
3.6.5 Swahili items in List B: are they helpful or not? ...................... 53
4. A few general remarks and concluding comments .................................... 54
4.1 The effects of Swahili, Tanzania’s lingua franca ................................ 55
4.2 Informant-idiosyncracies .................................................................... 56
4.3 The structure of the questionnaires ..................................................... 56
4.4 From spontaneous spelling to a practical orthography ....................... 58
4.5 A final remark ..................................................................................... 58
BIBLIOGRAPHY & REFERENCES ......................................................... 59
ANNOTATED WORD LISTS ..................................................................... 78
INDEXES ....................................................................................................... 260
English index ................................................................................................... 260
Swahili index ................................................................................................... 266
Haya index ...................................................................................................... 269
List of figures and tables
FIGURES
1. The location of Haya, with neighbouring languages .......................... 8
2. Approximate distribution of Haya dialect areas ................................. 12
3. From intentions via elicitation to analyses .......................................... 13
TABLES
1. Overview of the Haya informants ....................................................... 10
2. Number of blank entries ...................................................................... 19
3. List of Swahili influenced items ......................................................... 23
4. The amount of Swahili influence ........................................................ 28
5. List of Swahili interferences ............................................................... 30
6. The amount of Swahili interference .................................................... 37
7. Numerical break-down of spelling choices (token-counts) ................ 38
8. The distribution of the graphemes ‹l› and ‹r› ...................................... 40
9. Response behaviour correlated with age -- I ....................................... 46
10. Response behaviour correlated with age -- II ..................................... 46
11. The total amount of Swahili effects .................................................... 52
Acknowledgements
The present book is based on material collected during two brief visits to Tanzania,
one in March and another one in November/December 2004. We met with both
Haya- and Nyamwezi-speaking informants. The present book is a summary of the
material we received from our Haya informants. We extend our unbounded
gratitude to all the informants we worked with.
In Tanzania, we received invaluable help also from Prof. Henry Muzale, who
helped us finding informants and arranged for a locale during the data elicitation
session. He further provided us with an advance copy of his draft lexicon of Haya,
which we have used extensively during the analyses of our informants’ responses.
Prof. Muzale has also commented and clarified many (to us) enigmatic parts of the
collected data.
As our informants wrote their responses by hand, it became necessary for us have
our informants’ responses transformed into an electronically readable format. This
painstaking job was performed by Mr Florian Kimolo at the University of
Daressalaam, to whom we owe our deepest gratitude.
At the University of Daressalaam, we received further help and comments from
Prof. Mugyabuso Mulokozi, Prof. Yunus Rubanza, Prof. Josephat Rugemalira, and
Ms Georgia Barongo, all of whom are primary speakers of either Haya or Nyambo.
We are eternally grateful for all their help.
In Göteborg, Mrs Flora D. Rutta-Nilsson, a primary speaker of Haya resident in
Sweden, has helped us translate and interpret some of the enigmatic responses, for
which we are greatly thankful.
We would also like to extend our gratitude to the participants of two seminars, one
at the Department of Oriental and African Languages, Göteborg University,
November 2004, and another at the Institute for Kiswahili Research, University of
Daressalaam, December 2004. We received many helpful and constructive
comments during these seminars, and we have tried our best to incorporate them
into the text below.
Our work was originally conceived of as a pilot study, but it was never properly
followed up. It was financed through a grant from Vetenskapsrådet, which was
administered our way by Prof. Karsten Legère, Department of Oriental and African
Languages, Göteborg University.
All errors and wrong-doings are, of course, our own responsibility.1
Jouni F. Maho & Abdulaziz Y. Lodhi
Sweden, March 2007
1 While JFM has been the main author and compiler of this book, the data collection and its
subsequent analysis was performed jointly by JFM and AYL.
NKORE-KIGA GANDA
Bukoba
NYAMBO
Musoma
HAYA Lake Victoria
RWANDA
Lake Natron
RUNDI TANZANIA
HANGAZA
SHUBI ZINZA Mwanza
Moshi
SUMBWA SUKUMA Arusha
Shinyanga Lake Eyasi
HA Lake
NYAMWEZI Manyara
Kigoma Tabora Singida Tanga Wete
Lake Sagara
Zanzibar
Dodoma
Town
Mpanda
Lake Morogoro Daressalaam
Tanganyika
Sumbawanga Lake Rukwa Iringa
Mbeya
Lindi
HAYA language
Lake Malawi Mtwara
Dodoma capital Songea
Bukoba major town
Lake Sagara major lake
Figure 1. The location of Haya, with neighbouring languages
Introduction
The present study centres around a set of word lists collected from 10 mother-
tongue speakers of Haya, one of the many Bantu languages spoken in Tanzania.
Our overall goal has been to look at how the informants’ responses differ from that
found in available descriptions of Haya. In short, we have tried to identify and
explain how the informants’ responses differ or deviate from what the literature
defines as Haya, here referred to as authoritative Haya. These differences (or
deviations) can be explained in a number of ways. They may, for instance, be
colloquial or dialect-specific forms not usually found in descriptions of Haya, or
they may be items of influence or interference from foreign languages (such as
Swahili). They may even be the results of misreadings and/or misunderstandings.
Our aim has been to analyse and categorize these deviations best we can, and offer
explanations for why they occur. This is, in other words, a methodological study
looking specifically at informant behaviour.
This introduction comprises the theoretical and analytical bulk of our work, that is,
there are presentations of and discussions about the informants, the data, with
analyses and explanations of various kinds, and so forth. This is followed by a
fairly complete Haya (linguistic) bibliography. After that comes the empirical bulk,
that is, the actual word lists, complete with annotations. These annotations are
referenced extensively throughout this introduction. At the end, there are also three
indexes.
1. Preliminary remarks on informants and word lists
Our data consists of lexical material collected by way of distributing word lists to
ten mother-tongue speakers of Haya, a Bantu language spoken in the north-western
parts of Tanzania (see figures 1 and 2). The informants, however, are MA students
at the University of Daressalaam and residents of Daressalaam, the heavily
Swahili-dominated former capital of Tanzania.
The word lists were collected at the campus of the University of Daressalaam
during March 2004. The whole enterprise took some three hours, including an
intermittent power cut that forced us to change locale.
The ten Haya informants are here referred to as H01, H02, H03, etc. (see table 1).
Eight informants are born in Bukoba District, two in Daressalaam. All of them
have attended primary and secondary schools in Bukoba. Furthermore, most of
them claim to read Haya texts on a regular basis, in particular the Haya Bible.
10 Ten annotated Haya wordlists
Inf. Informant characteristics In Daressalaam
H01 Female, 27 years, born/raised in Bukoba n/a
H02 Male, 37 years, born/raised in Bukoba 3 years
H03 Male, 24 years, born/raised in Bukoba 1 year
H04 Male, 50 years, born/raised in Bukoba 20 years (on and off)
H05 Female, 26 years, born in Dar., raised in Bukoba 17 years
H06 Female, 30 years, born/raised in Daressalaam n/a
H07 Male, 33 years, born/raised in Bukoba 14 years
H08 Female, 41 years, born/raised in Bukoba 2 years
H09 Male, 46 years, born/raised in Bukoba n/a
H10 Male, 28 years, born/raised in Bukoba 8 years
Table 1. Overview of the Haya informants.
All have attended primary and secondary schools in Bukoba, and were at the time of study
students at the University of Daressalaam.
We used two word lists (List A and List B) containing 687 and 616 entries,
respectively.2 List A contained only English entries, while List B contained both
Swahili and English entries. Otherwise they were virtually identical (see below).
The informants were asked to fill in the word they would normally use in
conversations at home, with parents, family, relatives. They were also asked “not
to think too long”.
When constructing the English List A, we first deleted all Swahili items from the
Swahili/English List B. Some of the entries in the Swahili/English List B contained
several English items, which were thus placed in separate entries on the English
List A. For example, entry (82) in the Swahili/English List B corresponds to
entries (82) and (621) in the English List A. This procedure accounts for the
discrepancy in number of entries in the two lists.
List B List A
82 enda; to go/move 82 to go
621 to move
2 Our word lists were based on similar lists originally prepared for the Tanzanian Language
Survey (cfr Nurse & Philippson 1975/99).
Ten annotated Haya wordlists 11
Informants H01 to H05 filled in List A, while the other five informants, i.e. H06-
H10, filled in List B. 3
2. The lexical reference data
In order to analyse and understand our informants’ responses, it has been necessary
for us to use some sort of reference data, with which to compare our material. For
this, we have used a number of published and unpublished sources. We have also
consulted Haya authorities at the University of Daressalaam, in particular Prof.
Henry Muzale, as well as Mrs Flora D. Rutta-Nilsson, a native Haya-speaker
resident in Göteborg, Sweden.
Whenever we refer to “our main Haya source materials”, we mean Henry Muzale’s
draft lexicon (dated 2004) and Shigeki Kaji’s Haya vocabulary (publ. 2000). In
addition to these, we have consulted briefer lexicons/word lists by Byarushengo
(1977c), Rehse (1915), Nurse et al. (1970s), Rascher (1958), as well as material
appearing in the Tanzanian Language Survey by Nurse & Philippson (1975/99).
We have also had at our disposal two unpublished collections of lexical material.
One of these comprises a set of assorted glossaries compiled and/or collected by
Hans Cory (which are located in the Hans Cory Collection at the library of the
University of Daressalaam), one of which is dated 1939, the others being undated.
The second set comprises a multi-part handwritten Swedish-Haya word list
compiled during the early 1950s by the Swedish missionary Kurt Löfgren. These
are currently in the care of Abdulaziz Y. Lodhi, at Uppsala University. Other
consulted sources are referred to where appropriate.
3. Analysing the informants’ responses
Our methodological strategy has been to compare our informants’ responses
(output) to our lexical reference data. The aim has been to identify differences or
deviations, and offer explanations for why they occur.
Some responses deviate from our written sources because they are the result of
misreadings and/or misunderstandings. Others deviate because they are dialect-
specific forms, colloquialisms, (legitimate) neologisms, etc., that is, forms that are
not always found in descriptive works (unless we are dealing with highly well-
described languages such as, say, English). There are in fact many reasons for why
any particular informant responds in any given way. We do not pretend to
understand all processes involved. Nor do we think it is possible to do so without
access to the inner workings of the minds of the informants, which by definition
would be impossible. Thus we have to reconstruct events as best we can.
3 Note that the entries are given in a slightly inconsistent order in the annotated lists that
follow further below. However, the lists were presented to the informants with all entries listed
in a consistent order. Thus entries (617) to (687) in the English List A, which comprises entries
that derive from broken-up List B entries, originally appeared at the end of List A.
12 Ten annotated Haya wordlists
UGANDA
Missenyi
Bugabo
Kiziba
( Kyamutwara
K
a
r Bukoba Town
a
g
Lake Ikimba
w Bukara
e
=
Kihanja
N
y
a
Bumbire Isl.
m
b
RWANDA Lake o
)
Mujunju
Iroba Isl.
Ihangiro
Lake
Victoria
National borders
Lake
Burigi
Dialect borders
Figure 2. Approximate distribution of Haya dialect areas.4
(cfr Mors 1955:703, Byarushengo 1977, Nurse et al 1970s, Tibazarwa 1994, Kaji 2000)
Figure 3 gives a simple overview of the process that leads from list-making, via
elicitation sessions, to analysis of data. The arrows represent the spots in the
process where some sort of interpretations occur. These are also the places where
various types of errors are likely to happen. The top-most downwards-pointing
arrow at (1) represents the difference between the (idealized) lists we intended or
wanted to use and the lists that we actually ended up using, which contained minor
amounts of (unintended) errors and mistakes. The informants’ reading and
interpreting of these lists is represented by the upwards-pointing arrows at (2), and
their responding is represented by the downwards-pointing arrows at (4). Having
4 In current classifications, Haya is assigned to the Rutara sub-group, which also includes
Nyambo, Zinza, Kerebe, Nyoro, Tooro, and Nkore-Kiga (cfr Nurse & Philippson 1980, and
Muzale 1998:1-6). “Internally, the dialects of Haya are very highly mutually intelligible, with
their boundaries normally running along lines of former chiefdoms” (Byarushengo 1977a:1). “A
speaker of any one of these dialects [including Nyambo] has little trouble understanding any of
the others” (Nurse et al 1970s:7).
Ten annotated Haya wordlists 13
RESEARCH INTENTIONS
↓
1 List construction, incl. choice of items, unintentional blunders, etc.
↓
ENGLISH LIST A SWAHILI/ENGLISH LIST B
↑ ↑
2
3 Informants H01-H05 Informants H06-H10
↓ ↓
4
INFORMANTS’ OUTPUT
↑
5 Our analyses, interpretations, comparisons, etc.
↓
OUR REFERENCE DATA
Figure 3. From intentions via elicitation to analyses
The big box (drawn with thick lines) represents the actual elicitation session, while
the smaller boxes (drawn with thin lines) represent sets of lexical material. The
arrows represent interpretative stages. The numbers are there for ease of
reference (see text).
received the informants’ output (responses), we then embarked on trying to analyse
them, which is represented by the arrows at (5).
The informants’ responses can be accounted for by reference to any of the arrows,
boxes and lines in figure 3. For instance, misreadings could be said to occur at the
arrows at (2), spelling errors would occur at the arrow at (4), etc. Sociolinguistic
factors, such as age, sex, educational background, etc., would be referred to (3).
There is one particularly important factor that accounts for a sizeable chunk of the
informants’ responses, but which is not explicitly represented in figure 3. This is
the over-arcing influence that Swahili has on all Tanzanian languages. For all
practical purposes, we can see this as part of cultural and personal “baggage” that
the informants take with them into the elicitation session, and thus treat it on par
with such factors as the informants’ age, sex, sociocultural and educational
background, etc. Thus we can refer all these things to (3) in figure 3.
14 Ten annotated Haya wordlists
Below follows a brief overview of how we have chosen to categorize the responses
we got:5
(1) The nature of our word lists and some consequences
Some of the response behaviour that we got can be correlated with
particular features inherent in our word lists. Obviously, all responses are
list-induced in one way or another, but some seemed to be more so than
others. For instance, some of the response behaviour can be explained by
the fact that one of our word lists had items in English only (List A)
whereas the other had items in both Swahili and English (List B). Some
types of responses, such as blank entries, were more common to the
English List A, which is likely caused by the informants not understanding
our English list items.
In some cases, the informants filling in the Swahili/English List B made a
“selective reading” of what was presented to them. In other words, they
chose to translate an aspect of the Swahili item that was/is not covered by
the English item.
There were also responses that were seemingly “molded” in accordance
with our list items beyond the mere act of translating. If the English item
happened to be a phrase, some informants occasionally chose to reply with
a phrase, even if a single lexical item would have been available as well as
more idiomatic.
Our word lists also contained a minor amount of mistakes/blunders, e.g.
misspelled entries, badly chosen entries, etc. These were not many, and we
cannot see that they had any serious effects on our material. However, their
occurrence did produce interesting things to discuss.
Above issues are discussed in §3.6 below.
(2) Non-intended and/or unexpected readings
One particular type of response behaviour can be accounted for by the
informants’ having, for whatever reason, read/interpreted our word lists in
ways that we had not intended or expected. Occasionally, the informants
seemingly misread/misinterpreted our items. This was mostly common
with English items in List A, e.g. reading ‹breathe› instead of ‹beard›, but it
happened with a few Swahili items in List B, too, e.g. reading ‹fungasha›
instead of ‹zungusha›.6
These things are discussed in §3.1 below.
(3a) Various informant characteristics
This refers to response behaviour that can be attributed to particular
characteristics of the informants, such as their age, sex, sociocultural
background, residence histories, etc. We include here also such things as
idiosyncratic choices of spelling and grammatical form. For instance, one
5 The numbers below refer to the bold-printed numbers on the left-hand side of figure 3.
6 See entries (11) and (361), respectively.