#Kinyarwanda

[unbearable-lightness-of-ink]

so anyway I really did start compiling a kinyarwanda/english dictionary/grammar guide out of all the random resources i've been hoarding on my phone (it doesn't have to be great, it just has to be better than searching multiple different files every time I'm looking for some obscure vocab or grammar detail) and one of these resources is some PDF uploaded to the internet archive and it's... not great. from the writing and contents it's clearly

old (my guess is mid-1900s. I don't remember colonial and post-colonial Rwandan history specifically enough to guess well here, but based on some of the typos, it was done on a typewriter and then scanned with OCR)

intended for missionaries (some examples of actual sentences in the "translate this" exercises include "I praise God because He saved me and He gave me peace and joy" and, I shit u not, "The blind man cannot see the Word of God, but he can hear and he can know the love of Jesus." it's. well for one thing this is basically useless vocabulary for me, and also it's cringe af)

written by someone who was not a linguist (at one point instead of just saying "if T is preceded by an unvoiced consonant, it turns into D" they give you a list of every unvoiced consonant and then recommend that you invent a mnemonic phrase to memorise the list?! why?)

written by someone who was shit with pronunciation (legit so many places where they're like "there's no way to describe how this sounds, you just have to ask someone to make the sound for you" my good bitch the phoneme might not be in english but I could describe it just fine. skill issue.)

but the thing that's really killing me about all this is that every time they try to explain tonal vowels or phonemes that aren't in english, they tell you to "ask an African to say it for you."

an. an what now? an African? babe there are approximately 1.5 billion people in Africa. Africa accounts for about 20% of the land on earth, it's the second-biggest continent, and it has an estimated two thousand living languages spoken throughout the continent.

and kinyarwanda? it has maybe 15-25 million native speakers, depending on which source I trust. it's spoken (almost*) exclusively in rwanda, which is the 9th smallest country in Africa--and that roundup includes islands off the coast of the continent. It has the second densest population in Africa but it still only has like 13 million people in it. and it's a very unique language. its closest relatives do not have the same phonemes that kinyarwanda has, and its closest relatives are also spoken by relatively few people. I don't know enough about kirundi to say much but I do know that it doesn't have the same vowel tones in all instances and it doesn't have some of the same consonant clusters. and the more widely spoken related languages that you're more likely to stumble on someone who knows how to speak? they're even worse for a reference; ask someone who speaks kiswahili to pronounce kinyarwanda for you and they will not pronounce the difference between, say, umuceri (rice) and umucyeri (berry), or the tonal difference between words like umusambi (floor mat) and umusambi (crested crane).

so, like. it's just absolutely sending me, this random white lady who was obviously a colonialist missionary, bothering to make a whole language guide to teach me how to proselytise in kinyarwanda, but along the way she's like "just ask an african--any african--how to say this" lady less than 1% of them are going to know this language but go off i guess

*almost because there's the diaspora of rwandan expats and immigrants in other countries plus the banyamulenge which is a whole aspect of it that has so much fraught history on all sides that I won't even try to say something intelligent about it, it's totally not my place/something i'm educated enough about, but to my knowledge most of them speak dialects that are more or less dissimilar to kinyarwanda; kinyamulenge and kinyabwisha are not the same as kinyarwanda. take it from my munyamulenge coworker who could never pronounce the difference between c and cy

[annasellheim]

Look, sometimes you need to interrupt an ESOL lesson to ask the translator on the phone to tell one of our senior students that they look cool as hell.

[kiralamouse]

Thanks so much for this! I knew that the non-colonizer languages around there are mostly Bantu, but I couldn’t begin to guess how dominant Kinyarwanda is or how many minority or neighbor languages might contribute to the name pool, and I have zero idea how much overlap Kinyarwanda and, say, Swahili have in phonemes and spelling… knowing the pronunciation AND the language is awesome!

And this is useful to me, I didn't know the "n" was silent. But otherwise his name is very intuitive to say. People don't really have an excuse

[nonenglishsongs]

The Good Ones - The Farmer (Kinyarwanda?)

[diamondnokouzai]

today my special esl student (special as in not spanish speaking) asked me to come see him play the flute in band 🥹

[enfaeutchie]

That POG moment when a language's /w/ patterns as velar

[kicking-and-screaming-etc]

so anyway about the new doctor. has anyone told the fandom yet that the actor's name means 'boyfriend'

[nullifier]

There's some girl here from africa who doesn't know english that great and only knows a bit of french and kinyarwanda and it's real fucked up cause google translate doesn't do it well so staff doesn't know what to do with her all the time...

[historic-on-main]

njyewe: ku ki uratsembatsemba isi!!!

kimanuka: ku ko hari abantu batekereza ko icyongereza ni rurimi rimwe bagomba kuvuga.

njyewe: bikwiye, ndabyumva

me: why are you destroying earth!!!

aliens: because theres people who think that english is the only language they need to speak

me: thats fair i understand

[aikinyarwandavideogenerator]

[onlinetranslatortool]

Want to translate fast? Online translator tool is a free and efficient tool to translate Kinyarwanda text into English. You can translate words, sentences, even paragraphs too!

[unbearable-lightness-of-ink]

have I mentioned I would die for ulysses

[kweza]

how many languages do you speak?

two: french and english

[illuminaryart]

No Greater Love. 16x20 watercolor and ink. Each "I love you" was written by a native speaker or student of that language. Afrikaans, American Sign Language, Arabic, Bijabo, Burmese, Czech,  Danish, Dutch,  English, Faroese, Fijian, Finnish, French, German, Greek (koine), Greek (modern), Gujarati, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hindi, Icelandic, Ilakano, Indonesian,  Italian, Japanese, Kinyarwanda, Korean, Kreyal, Kriol, Latin, Latvian,  Lingala, Luganda, Malay,  Malay, Mandarin,  Melpa, Mongolian, Nakui, Nepali, Papua New Guinean Pidgin (three versions), Polish, Portuguese, Romanian,  Runyankore, Russian, Samoan,  Sesotho, Slovak,  Sorimi, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil,  Tedim, Thai, Tohono O’odham, Tongan, Turkish, Urdu, Vietnamese, Xhosa, Yoruba, Zulu.

[nonenglishsongs]

ELEMENT EleéeH, Ross Kana, Bruce Melodie - FOU DE TOi (English, Kinyarwanda*, French)

[bunjywunjy]

hi, I was using Google Lens Translate on the Pokémon post I reblogged from you earlier to read the Japanese image captions, and the auto-detect translation seems to think your username means "my love" in Kinyarwanda/Rwandan.

did some reverse translation investigations, and it's probably interpreting bunjywungy as a misspelling of "mukunzi wanjye"

anyway, I don't feel any particular way about this other than it was a funny/sweet little moment reading through this cute Pokémon post and seeing that I had reblogged it from "my love". thanks for putting cool stuff on my dash, I hope you're having a good day.

I LOVE THIS THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR SHARING