There are two matters for us to consider.The first is that of the association of Alhamisi with religious connotations and if that is only specific to Kiswahili language (community); and the second is if the borrowing of Alhamisi is linguistically well motivated even for that purpose. For both these matters, we shall be comparing the Kiswahili calendar with that of its neighbours to determine what we think is a discrepancy, especially, with the Kiswahili borrowing of Alhamisi. We shall discuss the issues above and others in this paper as follows. In the following section we shall, briefly, consider the basis of the formulation of some week calendars.This will be followed by the consideration of the week calendars of a number of languages in East Afiica. Lastly, we shall focus specifically on the Kiswahili week calendar; comparing it with the others and drawing our conclusion.

Few East African groups have attracted the attention of academics as much as the Swahili of coastal Kenya and Tanzania. The Swahili town of Lamu has even been described as having more professional researchers than doctors per inhabitant (Mazmi and Shariff 1994:2). Researchers commonly describe the Swahili as having a maritime culture (Middleton 1992:8; Nurse and Spear 1985:97; Prins 1965:263-275) and looking to the sea for their livelihood and identity (Mazmi and Shariff 1994:19; Ylvisaker 1975:74-83). They stress the contact of the `sea-prowling` Swahili with the ocean through seafaring, trading, fishing, and boat building to acquire wealth and social standing (Mazmi and Sharif 1994: 19; Middleton 1992: 8). Futhermore, the origin of the word Swahili is said to stress the proximity of the sea, coming from the Arabic sawahil (coast) or being of local origin, swahili (literally this island), making the Swahili variously the people of the coast (Middleton 1992:1) or the people of this island (Mazmi and Shariff 1994:56).

Kiswahili has many ways to express different relations that may hold between two events occurring at the same time. In this paper I examine and contrast the meanings of two types of verbal forms: those with the class 16 relative concord marker -po- and those with the tense marker -ki-. All examples are taken from a single small novel. I conclude that forms with PO tell us where or, more frequently, when something else occurred, whereas events presented in the KI-tense describe the situation existing at the time of some other event (`situative´). When that other event is non-factual the situation presented in the KI-tense expresses a condition. Elsewhere, the situation presented in the KI-tense may be backgrounded (in the discourse analysis sense of the term), but it may also be the main event that is hidden behind a more superficial situation (pace Contini-Morava 1989).

Chachage Seithy L. Chachage amepata kuandika riwaya nyingine tatu: Sudi ya Yohana (1980), Kivuli (1984) na Almasi za Bandia (1990). Riwaya yake ya nne Makuadi wa Soko Huria (2002) ni ya kihistoria na yenye upekee wa maudhui, muundo na mtindo. Vipengele hivi vinadhihirisha ukomavu na upeo wa juu wa mwandishi ilimradi kwenda sambamba na changamoto ya utandawazi ya karne ya ishirini na moja ya milenia ya tatu. Mwandishi amekitabaruku kitabu hiki kwa kumbukumbu ya Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere (1922-1999).

Kiswahili language has undergone a lot of changes in the last decades especially at the lexical level. Many lexical items have been coined, adapted, borrowed or modified to express concepts that were hitherto unknown or non existent in the Swahili world view cosmology. One area that has witnessed a lot of these changes has been the area of sciences, or better put science has been a prime causer of many neologisms in this language. This eventuality has gone a long way to disprove the naive assumptions that the language has not come of age to express scientific concepts.

Obituary for Andrej Aleksejevic Zhukov

This paper is intended to give a somewhat personal view of the new TUKI English-Swahili Dictionary (hereafter TUKI). This new dictionary is the work of many years and it`s publication is indeed to be heralded and welcomed. Both the TUKI dictionary and the publication of its earlier `companion` the Kamusi ya Kiswahili Sanifu (KKS), which I have consulted in reviewing TUKI, are major publishing events and important contributions to Swahili lexicography. They establish the Institute of Kiswahili Research as an important, credible, and productive African research enterprise, and all of us involved in teaching Swahili owe the Institute our congratulations and support.

Complex predicates (CP) have attracted the attention of a number of linguists, and their syntactic properties have been widely investigated cross-linguistically. This paper describes Swahili “complex predicates”, that is, verbal constructions (V+N) which resemble a typical verb-object relation, but function like a single lexical verb. In particular, we will deal with a specific type of CP, involving body part terms as part of the predicate, such as -fa moyo, lit. die heart, ‘despair’; -kata ini, lit. cut liver, ‘cause suffering’; or -toka damu, lit. go out blood, ‘bleed’. We show how body part nouns differ from other nominal elements typically employed in complex predicates, both in their syntactic properties (e.g. object marking and possessor raising) and in their semantic characteristics (e.g. degree of semantic compositionality). Indeed, body part terms are often employed to conceptualize more abstract entities and ideas which belong to different semantic domains. Unlike other nominal elements, they seem to occupy the slot of regular objects, while they are not syntactic arguments of the verb, but rather define the scope, range, character or extent of the process.

This article is a comparative study of the critiques of developments in Shona and Swahili poetry that began in 1970s Tanzania and 1980s Zimbabwe, after the introduction of regular patterns in Shona poetry (late 1950s) and of free verse in Swahili literature (late 1960s). These verse forms became the object of heated debate about the nature of ‘tradition’ and of ‘colonial’ innovation among scholars, intellectuals and poets. These debates went beyond notions of stylistic canons; rather, they focused on identity, as closely connected with tradition and the need for decolonization. The problem recognized in this paper is that this criticism became prescriptive, implying the risk of limiting verbal-artistic expression in terms of style and content. This article shows a continuity between these different contexts in relation to critical opposition to stylistic innovation and freedom of (expressing) thought. By comparing the poetry and philosophy of the Tanzanian poet Euphrase Kezilahabi and Zimbabwean poet Chirikure Chirukure, this paper problematizes the terms of these debates and proposes an inductive and aesthetic approach to texts that avoids prescriptivism.

Uandishi kuhusu ushahidi wa maingiliano katika Bahari ya Hindi katika karne ya 18 na 19 umechukua sura mpya mara baada ya washairi mashuhuri wa Kiswahili kugusia masuala ya utamaduni wa manukato au tarabizuna katika kazi zao. Washairi hao kama vile Liyongo, Mwanakupona, Sikujua, Himidi, Abdalla na wengineo wamegusia suala la manukato kama sehemu ya utamaduni uliokopwa kutoka Asia-Arabuni au Umangani hadi pwani ya Afrika ya Mashariki. Ni kwa nini suala la manukato linatumika kama kigezo cha kuathiriana kitamaduni baina ya Wahindi, Waarabu na Waswahili? Makala haya yanajenga hoja kuwa motifu ya manukato ni mojawapo ya kielelezo cha maingiliano ya kitamaduni baina ya wadau wa Bahari ya Hindi katika kazi hizo za sanaa. Makala yanatoa fursa ya kuliangalia swala la manukato linavyoibua mfumo wa kijamii na suala zima la usawa wa kijinsia, osmolojia, mahusiano ya ndoa, utambulisho na sanaa ya mapambo. / Writing about the evidence of the Western Indian Ocean connections in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have taken a new turn following manifestation of the perfumery customs in the works of Liyongo, Mwanakupona, Sikujua, Himidi, Abdalla and others who are classical celebratory Swahili poets and yet they have evoked the perfumery trope in their works as part of the adapted oriental customs in the Swahili coastal littoral. Why is the perfumery trope used as an emblematic entity of influence and contact between Asia, Arabs and African Swahili? This article argues that the motif of perfume in those Swahili poems represents the study of cultural hybridity around the Western Indian Ocean rim. This study gives opportunity for scholars to examine how the perfumery trope symbolizes social issues, osmology (power and marginality), marital relations, identity, and ornamentation customs.