Saturday, September 5, 2015

Long Live!

Long Live Thomas Sankara!
Long Live Burkina Faso!
Long Live Africa!

Thursday, September 3, 2015

Versions of the Kalanga letter "B"

From what I have often written about the Kalanga pronunciation of the letter "B", a non-Kalanga speaker would have difficulty reading three Kalanga infinitive verbs: Ku Bika; Ku Bika and Ku Vika.

The "B" in the first verb, "Ku Bika" (To cook) should be pronounced like the "B" in the religious "Gautama Buddha".

The "B" in the second verb, also written "Ku Bika" (To report) is the soft "B", which in Shona language has been transformed to a "V"; but in Russian remains a "B", although when Russian is translated to English, this "B" becomes a "V". All Kalanga words relating to people groups (or types) e.g, Ba-Kalanga, Ba-Ngwato, Banhu, Bathu, Ba-English, have their "B" in this category.

The "V" in the third verb, "Ku Vika" (To block (a blow)) is pronounced the same way as a "V" in English.

It was with the above in mind that I was pleasantly surprised to find that according to Russian history, the first people to settle in ancient Russia, around the present-day city of Kiev, were called Varangians. Correctly written in Kalanga, these people were Ba-Ra-nGi, meaning "Ra's people on Earth".  "Gi" meaning Earth, is not Kalanga; it's Anunnaki language. It is consistently written with a "G" as in I-Gi-Puta (Egypt), and never with a "K", contrary to what some Tswana language writers (TLWs) would have us believe. Some TLWs claim that the last "ki" in Anunnaki refers to Earth, and that Anu-Nna-Ki means Anu who lives on Earth. I mean really? Aren't these the people whom ancient Russian history has called "Varangians"? I maintain that Anu-nnaki is Kalanga, and it simply means Anu-the-Good.

You see, Setswana language developed out of Kalanga. It is a version of Kalanga which is especially suited to be audible in a noisy animal environment. Try saying "Nthu" (meaning "Person"), when cows are moo-ing for their young ones and you will not be heard. But the Setswana version "Motho/Muthu", or for that matter the Shona version "Munhu", is well audible even under those conditions.

Speaking about a "person", the Russian word for a person/human being is quite revealing. In Russian, the word "Vek" (written in Russian alphabet, of course) means 100 years or an age or a lifetime! The Kalanga verb "Ku tjila (pronounced Ku Chila)" means "To live". The Russian word "Chilavek" (written in Russian alphabet of course) means "human being".

We thus have it in Russian that a human being is an animal which lives for about a hundred years. Is this proof that there have been non-human beings, but beings all the same, whose lives used to last either a lot longer or a lot shorter than a hundred years?