Traces of Kiswahili phonology and orthography in the EkeGusii Holy Bible: An analysis of consonants in Kiswahili nouns borrowed into EkeGusii.
Keywords:
Traces, orthography, phonology, consonant, influence, EkeGusiiAbstract
This paper investigates the influence of Kiswahili orthography and phonology on EkeGusii consonant orthography and phonology This paper was intended to establish the consonant orthographic and pronunciation inaccuracies in the EkeGusii Holy bible This was in the view of the fact that EkeGusii consonant orthography and phonology in the existing published EkeGusii texts such as Ngoko (1979) and Bosire & Machogu (2013) among others seem to be accurate. The objectives of the study were: to establish the discrepancies between the orthographies and phonologies of EkeGusii and Kiswahili languages, to determine what EkeGusii phonological and orthographic systems do to the Kiswahili grapheme and phoneme consonants not present in the EkeGusii systems that enter into the systems as observed in the EkeGusii Holy bible and, to suggest corrective measures to any inaccuracy observed in the EkeGusii holy bible. The study was conducted through content analysis, a descriptive research design. Data was collected from the EkeGusii Holy bible translated from Kiswahili. All the orthographically and phonologically inaccurate (consonantal) words constituted the population of the study. The sample size of the study was obtained by purposively choosing two orthographically and phonologically inaccurately presented words for each consonant grapheme and phoneme. The population of the respondents included all EkeGusii speakers who are able to read/write in the EkeGusii language. The sample size of the respondents included 5 pastors who were randomly selected. A questionnaire which doubled up as an interview schedule was used to collect data from the respondents. Data was analyzed through the qualitative content analysis method in which the presence of targeted graphemes and phonemes were determined and analyzed. The study established that there are a number of Kiswahili consonant phonemes and graphemes not present in the EkeGusii phonological and orthographic systems. Examples of consonant phonemes: /l, d, f, v, g, z/etc. as in /lala/ “sleep”, /damu/ “blood,” /fanya/ “do” , /piga/ “beat”, /vuka/ “cross” /punguza/ “reduce” Examples of graphemes: <l, d, f, v, ʃ/ etc. as in < lete> ‘bring, <dunia> “world”, <funga> “tie”, <shika> “hold” It was further established that the spellings and pronunciations of Kiswahili were transferred to EkeGusii orthography and pronunciation in the EkeGusii bible, hence the inaccuracies observed. The paper concludes that the inaccuracies in the EkeGusii bible are caused by errors of translation because as Nyakundi (2010) correctly observes, “arguably the missionaries could not have known the EkeGusii language well. It is also possible that the people who assisted the missionaries in translation were not experts in this field (linguistics). It is recommended that the orthographic and phonological inaccuracies in the EkeGusii bible be corrected by replacing the inaccurate Swahili graphemes and phonemes with EkeGusii ones.
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