The University of Nairobi Journal of Language and Linguistics

TRANSLATING FROM ENGLISH INTO EKEGUSII IN RADIO BROADCASTS: PRESENTERS’ “MISTRANSLATIONS” vs. NATIVE SPEAKERS’ ACCEPTABILITY OF THEM

2024-10-02T07:33:33+00:00

This paper investigates the procedures which presenters on Egesa FM (a radio station broadcasting in Ekegusii) use to translate segments of news and advertisements from English into Ekegusii, a Bantu language of Kenya. One prevalent procedure they use is calque. For example, they translate the English phrase breaking news as amang’ana amayia buna agwateka, which literally means ‘words new now breaking’. This translation is quite unidiomatic in Ekegusii to the extent that combining the idea of gwateka (‘to break, i.e. to split something into two or more parts’) with that of amang’ana amayia (‘news’) is quite unnatural in Ekegusii, because for the speakers of this language (Abagusii), only something that is concrete and solid (though not necessarily strong) can break. Beyond sounding unnatural, some of such “mistranslations” are likely to sound offensive in relation to Ekegusii culture. The aim of the present paper is to analyse them with a view to drawing attention to the extent of the “cultural damage” they are likely to cause to an African mother tongue like Ekegusii. This damage arises from what the paper calls pragmatic implausibility and semantic inadequacy.

AN ANALYSIS OF SUBSTITUTION ERRORS MADE IN READING STANDARD CHINESE CHARACTERS BY STUDENTS OF THE CONFUCIUS INSTITUTE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NAIROBI

2024-10-02T12:52:54+00:00

The present study investigated the errors made in reading standard Chinese characters by students of the Confucius Institute at the University of Nairobi. Each participant was given a passage to read aloud in isolation while being recorded using an audio recorder. Errors were then identified and analysed. The study identified three major types of errors: errors of substitution, errors of omission and errors of addition. In this paper only errors of substitution are discussed because they were numerous.

CONDITIONAL SENTENCES IN GĨKŨYŨ (KIKUYU, E51)

2024-10-02T12:55:23+00:00

This paper presents a morphosyntactic characterisation and a semantic classification of Gĩkũyũ conditional sentences. A morphosyntactic characterisation of Gĩkũyũ conditional constructions shows the following types of conditional sentences: a) a conditional situative, which is a type of conditional sentence without an overt conditional marker; b) conditional clauses that are lexically expressed by kɔrwɔ, ɔkɔrwɔ, angekɔrwɔ, and morphologically by -nge-. The different meanings and usages of these conditional markers contribute to the typology of semantic classification of Gĩkũyũ conditional clauses. Semantically, these can be classified under two categories: realis and irrealis conditionals. The realis category constitutes the conditional situatives and factual conditionals, while the irrealis category subsumes the other types of conditionals: a) the predictive conditionals realised by conditional situatives, ɔkɔrwɔ, -nge-and angekɔrwɔ, b) the hypothetical conditionals and the counterfactual conditionals marked by kɔrwɔ and -nge-. Exceptionally, the morphological conditional marker -nge- occurs in all other conditional types except conditional situatives.

THE PRONOMINAL SYSTEM OF OKIEK

2024-01-25T08:06:59+00:00

This paper describes the morphological, morphophonological, morphosyntactic and semantic properties of the pronominal system of the Nessuit variety of Okiek – a branch in the Kalenjin language family in the Southern Nilotic subdivision (Rottland 1982, 1983) of the Nilo-Saharan phylum (Greenberg 1963). The data used in this paper consists of wordlists, phrases and sentences collected through elicitation interviews, from short stories, and from real life speech events during fieldwork conducted by the author in Nessuit town in the Nakuru County of Kenya between 2019 to 2022. The findings show that: (1) there are five sets of pronominal morphemes (personal, demonstrative, possessive, interrogative, and relative pronouns); (2) personal, demonstrative, and possessive pronouns can occur as independent or bound grammatical items; (3) interrogative pronouns occur as independent items; (4) the pronominal system is associated with the grammatical categories of number, tense, aspect, person and case; (7) all bound pronominal elements are suffixes except for bound subject pronouns which are prefixes; (8) bound pronominal elements are subjected to vowel harmony with the exception of bound possessive pronouns; (9) the distribution of bound demonstrative suffixes is governed by tense and aspect categories; (10) independent possessive pronouns are morphosyntactically linked to the head noun by a relative pronoun; and (11) certain verbal and nominal phrases are used for a function that is expressed by indefinite pronouns in English. These findings complement the study of the pronominal system of the Mariashoni variety of Okiek by Micheli (2018) and form a base for further explorations of Okiek and comparative investigations into Southern Nilotic grammar.