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The etymology of mbunzú for ‘White-man’ in Sango: Central African history
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Abstract:
The word mbunzú (occurring in literature also as mbunju) for a white person in Sango might have an origin in Ngbandi, the indigenous language that provided most of its linguistic material, or a Bobangi one. A Ngbandi origin would appear to be the better one because it is indigenous and is found in a trustworthy dictionary. It occurs as mbunzú in Lekens 1958 with one meaning: ‘white,’ as a noun. The gloss is followed by a note, according to which the word referred to (“werd gegeven aan”) the chief (“hoofdman”) elephant, whose hide was red (“rood”). When blacks for the first time saw white persons, they compared them with the elephant (“in verwantschap met”). This seems to be a folk etymology. We note that the word is not entered as one meaning something like ‘red elephant’ or ‘the leader of a herd of elephants.’ And while the hides of elephants must always vary in color, we cannot attest to the leaders (always female, it is said) being red-skinned. In his dictionary of 1952 the word is considered a noun referring only to whites and there are four adjectives for ‘white’ as well as an ideophone. Like other words in the language, this one must have been copied from Sango. A strong argument for its origin in Sango is that (a) the first Ngbandis to have encountered whites were the riverine ones in 1887, not the ones among whom Fr Lekens was working and (b) the first language used by Catholic missionaries among them was Sango. The hypothesis proposed here is that mbunzu the Sango word for a white (man or woman) is related to the Bondjo, an ethnic group alleged to have inhabited the region somewhere around Bangui and further south in the 1890s.
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Keyword:
Africa; Central African Republic; Language and colonization; Sango language
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URL: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/76688
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