2005
459 pp.
10 tables
Text language: English
The Bantu language Rumanyo (K.70) is spoken in two dialectal variants – Rushambyu and Rugciriku – on both sides of the middle Kavango River in the northern part of Namibia. Approximately 120,000 people speak this tone language. It is used as medium at the local schools and in the educational literature, and it is supraregionally broadcasted through the Kavango Radio.
The intellectuals of the politico-cultural active class write belletristic literature in their native language, and they are getting more and more in evidence in the national context of Namibia. In the year 1965 Möhlig collected a list of words with 2,000 entries in Rugciriku, French, and German, in 1967 he wrote a grammatical sketch in German.
The South African apartheid government standardized the Rumanyo orthography in 1988. This was an essential precondition for the dictionary, which can therefore also be used by the native population. The authors succeeded in compiling a dictionary with 10,000 keywords in close cooperation with native experts – especially with the school inspector Karl Peter Shiyaka-Mberema.
The book is divided into three parts. The main part includes the Rumanyo-English wordlist with exhaustive information about every entry concerning grammar, syntax and semantics. The tonal rules for the context bound usage are marked graphically for every word, too. In addition, cross references show derivations as well as word formations. The second part consists of the wordlist English-Rumanyo. At the end of this book the reader finds a grammatical sketch. In this chapter the separate information parts of the dictionary are established a systematic correlation.
Following the book covers below, you will find further publications featuring languages and cultures at the Kavango/Namibia in our programme:
