To browse Academia. Some proverbs, idioms, nominal compounds, and slogans duplicate in form and meaning between several languages. On this ground, Kiswahili academies and a number of experts of Kiswahili assumed β prior to the present study β that the Kiswahili versions of the expressions are the derivatives from their English congruent counterparts. The assumption nonetheless lacked empirical evidence and also discounted other potential causes of the phenomenon, i.
Out of this background, we assumed an academic obligation of empirically investigating what causes this formal and semantic duplication of strings of words multiword expressions between English and Kiswahili to a degree beyond chance expectations. In this endeavour, we employed checklist to 24, interview to 43, online questionnaire to , translation test to 47 and translationality test to 8 respondents.
Online questionnaire respondents were from 21 regions of Tanzania, whereas, those of the rest of the tools were from Zanzibar, Dar es Salaam, Pwani, Lindi, Dodoma and Kigoma.
Furthermore, we reviewed the Bible, dictionaries, encyclopaedia, books, articles, expressions lists, wikis, and phrase books in pursuit of etymologies, and histories of concepts underlying the focus expressions. Our analysis shows that most of the Kiswahili versions of the focus expressions are the function of loan translation and rendition from English. We found that economic, political and technological changes, mostly induced by liberalization policy of the s in Tanzania, created lexical gaps in Kiswahili that needed to be filled.
We discovered that Kiswahili, among other means, fill such gaps through loan translation and loan rendition of English phrases. We can conclude that Kiswahili finds it easier and economical to translate the existing English labels for imported notions rather than innovating original labels for the concepts. Even so, our analysis revealed that a few of the Kiswahili duplicate multiword expressions might be a function of nativism, cognitive metaphoricalization and analogy phenomena.
