Shona Language
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Shona Language
Shona (; sn, chiShona) is a Bantu language of the Shona people of Zimbabwe. It was codified by the colonial government in the 1950s. According to ''Ethnologue'', Shona, comprising the Zezuru, Korekore and Karanga dialects, is spoken by about 7.5 million people. The Manyika dialect of Shona is listed separately by ''Ethnologue'', and is spoken by 1,025,000 people. The larger group of historically related languages—called Shona languages by linguists—also includes Ndau (Eastern Shona) and Kalanga (Western Shona). Instruction Shona is a written standard language with an orthography and grammar that was codified during the early 20th century and fixed in the 1950s. In the 1920s, the Rhodesian administration was faced with the challenge of preparing schoolbooks and other materials in the various languages and dialects and requested the recommendation of South African linguist Clement Doke. The first novel in Shona, Solomon Mutswairo's ''Feso'', was published in 1957. Sh ...
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Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe (), officially the Republic of Zimbabwe, is a landlocked country located in Southeast Africa, between the Zambezi and Limpopo Rivers, bordered by South Africa to the south, Botswana to the south-west, Zambia to the north, and Mozambique to the east. The capital and largest city is Harare. The second largest city is Bulawayo. A country of roughly 15 million people, Zimbabwe has 16 official languages, with English, Shona, and Ndebele the most common. Beginning in the 9th century, during its late Iron Age, the Bantu people (who would become the ethnic Shona) built the city-state of Great Zimbabwe which became one of the major African trade centres by the 11th century, controlling the gold, ivory and copper trades with the Swahili coast, which were connected to Arab and Indian states. By the mid 15th century, the city-state had been abandoned. From there, the Kingdom of Zimbabwe was established, followed by the Rozvi and Mutapa empires. The British Sout ...
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Bantu Language
The Bantu languages (English: , Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀) are a large family of languages spoken by the Bantu people of Central, Southern, Eastern africa and Southeast Africa. They form the largest branch of the Southern Bantoid languages. The total number of Bantu languages ranges in the hundreds, depending on the definition of "language" versus "dialect", and is estimated at between 440 and 680 distinct languages."Guthrie (1967-71) names some 440 Bantu 'varieties', Grimes (2000) has 501 (minus a few 'extinct' or 'almost extinct'), Bastin ''et al.'' (1999) have 542, Maho (this volume) has some 660, and Mann ''et al.'' (1987) have ''c.'' 680." Derek Nurse, 2006, "Bantu Languages", in the ''Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics'', p. 2:Ethnologue report for Southern Bantoid" lists a total of 535 languages. The count includes 13 Mbam languages, which are not always included under "Narrow Bantu". For Bantuic, Linguasphere has 260 outer languages (which are equivalent to languages ...
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Kalanga Language
Kalanga, or ''TjiKalanga'' (in Zimbabwe), is a Bantu language spoken by the Kalanga people in Botswana and Zimbabwe. It has an extensive phoneme inventory, which includes palatalised, velarised, aspirated and breathy-voiced consonants, as well as whistled sibilants. Kalanga is recognised as an official language by the Zimbabwean Constitution of 2013 and is taught in schools in areas where its speakers predominate.The iKalanga language is closely related to the Nambya, TshiVenda, and KheLobedu languages of Zimbabwe and South Africa. Classification and varieties Linguists place Kalanga (S.16 in Guthrie's classification) and Nambya (in the Hwange Hwange (formerly Wankie) is a town in Zimbabwe, located in Hwange District, in Matabeleland North Province, in northwestern Zimbabwe, close to the international borders with Botswana and Zambia. It lies approximately , by road, southeast of ... region of Zimbabwe) as the western branch of the Shona group (or Shonic, or ...
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Dialect Continuum
A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varieties may not be. This is a typical occurrence with widely spread languages and language families around the world, when these languages did not spread recently. Some prominent examples include the Indo-Aryan languages across large parts of India, varieties of Arabic across north Africa and southwest Asia, the Turkic languages, the Chinese languages or dialects, and subgroups of the Romance, Germanic and Slavic families in Europe. Leonard Bloomfield used the name dialect area. Charles F. Hockett used the term L-complex. Dialect continua typically occur in long-settled agrarian populations, as innovations spread from their various points of origin as waves. In this situation, hierarchical classifications of varieties are impractical ...
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Malcolm Guthrie
Malcolm Guthrie (10 February 1903 – 22 November 1972) was an English linguist who specialized in Bantu languages. Guthrie was a foremost professor of Bantu languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. He is known primarily for his classification of Bantu languages, Guthrie 1971. The classification, though based more on geography than linguistic relatedness, is nonetheless the most widely used. Together with the Belgian linguist Achille Émile Meeussen (1912–1978), he is regarded as one of the two leading Bantu specialists of the second half of the 20th century. Schadeberg, Thilo C., in Nurse & Philippson (eds.) (2003), p. 144. Early life and career Malcolm Guthrie was born in Hove, Sussex, England, the son of a Scottish father and a mother of Dutch extraction. After schooling at Ipswich, he took a degree in metallurgy at Imperial College, London. Shortly afterwards, however, he felt called to the Baptist ministry. He served for two y ...
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Great Zimbabwe
Great Zimbabwe is a medieval city in the south-eastern hills of Zimbabwe near Lake Mutirikwi and the town of Masvingo. It is thought to have been the capital of a great kingdom during the country's Late Iron Age about which little is known. Construction on the city began in the 9th century and continued until it was abandoned in the 15th century. The edifices are believed to have been erected by the ancestral Shona. The stone city spans an area of and could have housed up to 18,000 people at its peak, giving it a population density of approximately 2,500 per square kilometre. It is recognised as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. Great Zimbabwe is believed to have served as a royal palace for the local monarch. As such, it would have been used as the seat of political power. Among the edifice's most prominent features were its walls, some of which are eleven metres high. They were constructed without mortar (dry stone). Eventually, the city was abandoned and fell into ruin. ...
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Dictionary
A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically (or by radical and stroke for ideographic languages), which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies, pronunciations, translation, etc.Webster's New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition, 2002 It is a lexicographical reference that shows inter-relationships among the data. A broad distinction is made between general and specialized dictionaries. Specialized dictionaries include words in specialist fields, rather than a complete range of words in the language. Lexical items that describe concepts in specific fields are usually called terms instead of words, although there is no consensus whether lexicology and terminology are two different fields of study. In theory, general dictionaries are supposed to be semasiological, mapping word to definition, while specialized dictionaries are supposed to be onomasiological, first ident ...
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Solomon Mutswairo
Solomon Mangwiro Mutswairo, also spelt Mutsvairo (26 April 1924 – November 2005), was a Zimbabwean novelist and poet. A member of the Zezuru people of central Zimbabwe, he wrote the first novel in the Shona language, ''Feso''. In his late years, Mutswairo was a central figure in Zimbabwean academic and cultural circles. He was the first person to be named Writer-in-Residence at the University of Zimbabwe, and was the Chairman of the National Arts Council of Zimbabwe during the late 1990s. Mutswairo wrote the text for " Simudzai mureza weZimbabwe", the Zimbabwean national anthem. Literary contributions ''Feso'', originally published in Zezuru in 1957 when Zimbabwe was still the colony of Southern Rhodesia, is a narrative with subtle political implications set several hundreds years ago, before colonization. Beyond the use of the Shona language itself, the novel incorporates a number of features of traditional Zezuru oral culture, including song and storytelling technique ...
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Clement Doke
Clement Martyn Doke (16 May 1893 in Bristol, United Kingdom – 24 February 1980 in East London, South Africa) was a South African linguist working mainly on African languages. Realizing that the grammatical structures of Bantu languages are quite different from those of European languages, he was one of the first African linguists of his time to abandon the Euro-centric approach to language description for a more locally grounded one. A most prolific writer, he published a string of grammars, several dictionaries, comparative work, and a history of Bantu linguistics. Missionary in Lambaland The Doke family had been engaged in missionary activity for the Baptist Church for some generations. His father Reverend Joseph J. Doke left England and travelled to South Africa in 1882, where he met and married Agnes Biggs. They returned to England, where Clement was born as the third of four children. The family moved to New Zealand and eventually returned to South Africa in 1903, where t ...
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Grammar
In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraints, a field that includes domains such as phonology, morphology, and syntax, often complemented by phonetics, semantics, and pragmatics. There are currently two different approaches to the study of grammar: traditional grammar and theoretical grammar. Fluent speakers of a language variety or ''lect'' have effectively internalized these constraints, the vast majority of which – at least in the case of one's native language(s) – are acquired not by conscious study or instruction but by hearing other speakers. Much of this internalization occurs during early childhood; learning a language later in life usually involves more explicit instruction. In this view, grammar is understood as the cognitive information underlying a specific instance of language productio ...
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Orthography
An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation. Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system, and most of these systems have undergone substantial standardization, thus exhibiting less dialect variation than the spoken language. These processes can fossilize pronunciation patterns that are no longer routinely observed in speech (e.g., "would" and "should"); they can also reflect deliberate efforts to introduce variability for the sake of national identity, as seen in Noah Webster's efforts to introduce easily noticeable differences between American and British spelling (e.g., "honor" and "honour"). Some nations (e.g. France and Spain) have established language academies in an attempt to regulate orthography officially. For most languages (including English) however, there are no such authorities and a sense of 'correct' orthography ...
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Iggy Teaching Shona
Iggy or Iggie is a unisex name and it is often a short form of the Roman Latin names Ignatia (feminine) and Ignatius (masculine), or their derivatives in other European languages. As such the name is derived ultimately from the Etruscan language family name ''Egnat'', the meaning of which is unknown. (The Romans added the Latin nominative endings ''-ia'' and ''-ius''.) A spelling with an initial "I" later became dominant, possibly because of a resemblance to the Latin word ''ignis'' "fire". Iggy or Iggie may also refer to: People * Iggy Pop, stage name of American punk rock singer and occasional actor James Newell Osterberg, Jr. (born 1947) * Iggy Azalea, stage name of Australian rapper Amethyst Amelia Kelly (born 1990) * Iggy Arroyo (1950–2012), Filipino politician * Iggy Clarke (born 1952), Irish retired hurler * Jarome Iginla (born 1977), Canadian National Hockey League player * Ralph Ignatowski (1926–1945), U.S. Marine tortured and killed at the Battle of Iwo Jima ...
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