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Songea is the capital of Ruvuma Region in southwestern Tanzania . It is located along the A19 road . The city has a population of 286,285, and is the seat of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Songea . Between 1905 and 1907, the city was a centre of African resistance during the Maji Maji Rebellion in German East Africa . The city is poised to experience significant economic growth in the near future as the Mtwara Corridor opens up in a few years. It is projected to be the sixth fastest growing city on the African continent between 2020 and 2025, with a 5.74% growth.

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47-561: The city took its names after one of the Ngoni warrior, killed in 1906 during the time of German repression of the Maji Maji rebellion . After the Second World War, the area was marked for rapid agricultural development linked to the ultimately disastrous groundnut scheme . A railway had been planned from the coast to Songea and actually appeared in 1950s high school geography text books. During

94-399: A homorganic nasal consonant (so-called "prenasalisation", described in more detail below) and optionally followed by the consonant /w/ . In addition, syllabic /m̩/ occurs as a reduction of former /mu/ , and acts like a true syllable: it can be syllabic even when not word-initial, and can also carry distinctive tones like a full syllable. It does not necessarily have to be homorganic with

141-424: A breathy consonant syllable, like dla , are [ɮǎ̤ ɮa̤᷈ ɮà̤] . A depressor does not affect a syllable that's already low, but it blocks assimilation to a preceding high tone so that the tone of the depressor syllable and any following low-tone syllables stays low. Prenasalisation occurs whenever a consonant is preceded by a homorganic nasal, either lexically or as a consequence of prefixation. The most notable case of

188-408: A high-tone syllable and another tonic syllable assimilates to that high tone. That is, if the preceding syllable ends on a high tone and the following syllable begins with a high tone (because it is high or falling), the intermediate toneless syllable has its pitch raised as well. When the preceding syllable is high but the following is toneless, the medial toneless syllable adopts a high-tone onset from

235-437: A labial consonant plus /w/ . Whenever /w/ follows a labial consonant, it changes to /j/ , which then triggers palatalization of the consonant. This effect can be seen in the locative forms of nouns ending in -o or -u , which change to -weni and -wini respectively in the locative. If a labial consonant immediately precedes, palatalization is triggered. The change also occurs in nouns beginning in ubu- with

282-586: A lion, Father ) and Siyonqoba (English: We will conquer ) was used. In some movie songs, like "This Land", the voice says Busa leli zwe bo ( Rule this land ) and Busa ngothando bo ( Rule with love ) were used too. The song Siyahamba is a South African hymn originally written in the Zulu language that became popular in North American churches in the 1990s. The remix of the 2019 worldwide hit Jerusalema contains lyrics in Zulu language. Standard Zulu as it

329-417: A lowering effect on pitch, adding a non-phonemic low-tone onset to the normal tone of the syllable. Thus, in syllables with depressor consonants, high tones are realised as rising, and falling tones as rising-then-falling. In both cases, the pitch does not reach as high as in non-depressed syllables. The possible tones on a syllable with a voiceless consonant like hla are [ɬá ɬâ ɬà] , and the possible tones of

376-448: A result of word position as well. The remote demonstrative pronouns may appear with the suffix -ana when sentence-final, but only as -ā otherwise. Likewise, the recent past tense of verbs ends in -ile sentence-finally, but is reduced to -ē medially. Moreover, a falling tone can only occur on a long vowel, so the shortening has effects on tone as well. Some words, such as ideophones or interjections, can have stress that deviates from

423-668: A state, using Zulu warfare techniques to conquer and integrate local peoples. The date on which Zwangendaba's party crossed the Zambezi river, sometimes given in early writings as 1825, has been argued to have been on 20 November 1835. Following Zwangendaba's death in 1848, succession disputes split the Ngoni people. Zwangendaba's following and the Maseko Ngoni eventually created seven substantial Ngoni kingdoms in Tanzania, Zambia and Malawi. While

470-532: A stem beginning with a vowel. The following changes occur as a result of palatalization: Zulu employs the 26 letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet . However, some of the letters have different pronunciations than in English. Additional phonemes are written using sequences of multiple letters. Tone, stress and vowel length are not indicated. Reference works and older texts may use additional letters. A common former practice

517-668: Is a Southern Bantu language of the Nguni branch spoken and indigenous to Southern Africa . It is the language of the Zulu people , with about 13.56 million native speakers, who primarily inhabit the province of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa . The word "KwaZulu-Natal" translates into English as "Home of the Zulu Nation is Natal". Zulu is the most widely spoken home language in South Africa (24% of

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564-399: Is a contraction of an earlier ilithambo /ílítʰámbó/ , which may still be used by some speakers. Likewise, uphahla /úːpʰaɬa/ "roof" is a contraction of the earlier uluphahla /ulúpʰaɬa/ . In addition, the vowel of the penultimate syllable is allophonically lengthened phrase- or sentence-finally. The use of click consonants is one of the most distinctive features of Zulu. This feature

611-465: Is a sequence of high-low and occurs only on long vowels. The penultimate syllable can also bear a falling tone when it is long due to the word's position in the phrase. However, when it shortens, the falling tone becomes disallowed in that position. In principle, every morpheme has an inherent underlying tone pattern which does not change regardless of where it appears in a word. However, like most other Bantu languages, Zulu has word tone , meaning that

658-606: Is coextensive with Songea Urban District and is divided into wards . It is managed by the Songea Municipal Council. 10°41′S 35°39′E  /  10.683°S 35.650°E  / -10.683; 35.650 This Ruvuma Region location article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Ngoni people The Ngoni people are an ethnic group living in the present-day Southern African countries of Malawi , Mozambique , Tanzania , Zimbabwe , and Zambia . The Ngoni trace their origins to

705-602: Is mostly predictable and normally falls on the penultimate syllable of a word. It is accompanied by an allophonic lengthening of the vowel. When the final vowel of a word is long due to contraction, it receives the stress instead of the preceding syllable. Lengthening does not occur on all words in a sentence, however, but only those that are sentence- or phrase-final. Thus, for any word of at least two syllables, there are two different forms, one with penultimate length and one without it, occurring in complementary distribution. In some cases, there are morphemic alternations that occur as

752-418: Is often not understood by young people. The vowel system of Zulu consists of five vowels. /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ are pronounced [ e ] and [ o ], respectively, if the following syllable contains the [+ ATR ] vowels /i/ or /u/ . They are [ɛ] and [ɔ] otherwise: There is limited vowel length in Zulu, as a result of the contraction of certain syllables. For example, the word ithambo /íːtʰámbó/ "bone",

799-496: Is shared with several other languages of Southern Africa, but it is very rare in other regions. There are three basic articulations of clicks in Zulu: Each articulation covers five click consonants, with differences such as being slack-voiced, aspirated or nasalised , for a total of 15. Zulu syllables are canonically (N)C(w)V , and words must always end in a vowel. Consonant clusters consist of any consonant, optionally preceded by

846-442: Is taught in schools, also called "deep Zulu" ( isiZulu esijulile ), differs in various respects from the language spoken by people living in cities (Urban Zulu, isiZulu sasedolobheni ). Standard Zulu tends to be purist , using derivations from Zulu words for new concepts, whereas speakers of Urban Zulu use loan words abundantly, mainly from English. For example: This situation has led to problems in education because standard Zulu

893-422: Is thus still lower in pitch than both of the adjacent syllables. Depressor consonants have an effect called tone displacement . Tone displacement occurs whenever a depressor occurs with a high tone, and causes the tone on the syllable to shift rightward onto the next syllable. If the next syllable is long, it gets a falling tone, otherwise a regular high tone. If the penultimate syllable becomes high (not falling),

940-532: The Nguni and Zulu people of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa . The displacement of the Nguni people in the great scattering following the Zulu wars had repercussions in social reorganization as far north as Malawi and Zambia. The rise of the Zulu nation to dominance in southern Africa in the early nineteenth century (~1815–~1840) disrupted many traditional alliances. Around 1817, the Mthethwa alliance, which included

987-670: The Northern Ndebele language ( isiNdebele ) is closely related to Zulu. Xhosa , the predominant language in the Eastern Cape , is often considered mutually intelligible with Zulu, as is Northern Ndebele . Maho (2009) lists four dialects: central KwaZulu-Natal Zulu, northern Transvaal Zulu, eastern coastal Qwabe, and western coastal Cele. The Zulu, like Xhosa and other Nguni people , have lived in South Africa for hundreds of years. The Zulu language possesses several click sounds typical of Southern African languages, not found in

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1034-416: The "teacher" meaning. In principle, every syllable can be pronounced with either a high or a low tone. However, low tone does not behave the same as the other two, as high tones can "spread" into low-toned syllables while the reverse does not occur. A low tone is therefore better described as the absence of any toneme; it is a kind of default tone that is overridden by high or falling tones. The falling tone

1081-468: The Ngoni have generally retained a distinct identity in the post-colonial states in which they live, integration and acculturation has led to them adopting local languages; nowadays the Zulu language is used only for a few ritual praise poems and songs. Mpezeni (also spelt Mpeseni ) was the warrior-king of one of the largest Ngoni groups, based in what is now the Chipata District of Zambia , and

1128-563: The Ngoni in Zambia's Eastern Province and Malawi's Mchinji district. His successors as chief take the title Paramount Chief Mpezeni to this day. The cruelty and ruthlessness of Mpezeni's raids can be understood from this account written by a British hunter who came across a Chewa village a few hours after a raid in 1897: On my arrival I found the male population all under arms, and the women crying. A raiding party of Mpezeni's people had attacked them suddenly that morning. Ten women were killed in

1175-582: The Ngoni were primarily agriculturalists, cattle were their main goal for raiding expeditions and migrations northward. Their reputation as refugees escaping Shaka is easily overstated; it is thought that no more than 1,000 Ngoni crossed the Zambezi river in the 1830s. They raided north, taking women in marriage and men into their fighting regiments. Their prestige became so great that by 1921, in Nyasaland alone, 245,833 people claimed membership as Ngoni although few spoke

1222-669: The Zulu army under Mabaso defeated the Ndwandwe alliance at the Battle of Mhlatuze River , near Nkandla . The battle resulted in the diaspora of many indigenous groups in southern Africa. In the following decades, Zwangendaba led a small group of his followers north through Mozambique and Zimbabwe to the region around the Viphya Plateau. In this region, present-day Zambia ( Chipata district), Malawi ( Mzimba , Ntcheu and Karonga district) and Tanzania ( Matema district), he established

1269-500: The Zulu clan, came into conflict with the Ndwandwe alliance, which included the Nguni people from what is now kwaZulu-Natal . One of the military commanders of the army of king Thunziani Mabaso The Great, Zwangendaba Gumbi ( c. 1780–1848), was the head of the Jele or Gumbi clan, which itself formed part of the larger emaNcwangeni alliance in what is now north-east KwaZulu-Natal . In 1819,

1316-526: The Zulu dialect called Ngoni. The Ngoni integrated conquered subjects into their warfare and organization, becoming more a ruling class than an ethnic group, and by 1906 few individuals were of pure Ngoni descent. Only after Ngoni status began to decline did the tribal consciousness of the component groups began to rise, along with their reported numbers. In the early 1930s the Ngonde, Nyasa, Tonga and other groups once again claimed their original tribal status. While

1363-422: The final syllable dissimilates and becomes low if it was not already. Tone displacement is blocked under the following conditions: Whenever tone displacement is blocked, this results in a depressor syllable with a high tone, which will have the low-tone onset as described above. When the following syllable already has a high or falling tone, the tone disappears from the syllable as if it had been shifted away, but

1410-451: The first full-length feature film in Zulu, Yesterday , was nominated for an Oscar . The mutual intelligibility of many Nguni languages has increased the likelihood of Zulu becoming the lingua franca of the eastern half of the country. In the 1994 film The Lion King , in the " Circle of Life " song, the phrases Ingonyama nengw' enamabala (English: A lion and a leopard spots ), Nans' ingonyama bakithi Baba (English: Here comes

1457-780: The following consonant, although the difference between homorganic nonsyllabic /mC/ and syllabic /m̩C/ is distinctive, e.g. umpetshisi /um̩pétʃiːsi/ "peach tree" (5 syllables) versus impoko /ímpoːɠo/ "grass flower" (3 syllables). Moreover, sequences of syllabic m and homorganic m can occur, e.g. ummbila /úm̩mbíːla/ "maize" (4 syllables). Recent loanwords from languages such as English may violate these constraints, by including additional consonant clusters that are not native to Zulu, such as in igremu /iːgreːmu/ " gram ". There may be some variation between speakers as to whether clusters are broken up by an epenthetic vowel or not, e.g. ikhompiyutha /iːkʰompijuːtʰa/ or ikhompyutha /iːkʰompjuːtʰa/ "computer". Stress in Zulu words

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1504-441: The following syllable's tone is not modified. Some examples: Palatalization is a change that affects labial and alveolar consonants whenever they are immediately followed by /j/ . While palatalization occurred historically, it is still productive and occurs as a result of the addition of suffixes beginning with /j/ . A frequent example is the diminutive suffix -yana . Moreover, Zulu does not generally tolerate sequences of

1551-402: The gardens and twenty-two were taken away as prisoners. An old man and one of the headman's children had been severely wounded. Their entrails hung out of frightfully torn wounds, inflicted most likely by barbed spears. It was a pitiful sight — the groans of the wounded, the women crying over their dead, whose bodies were brought from the gardens, the men standing about helplessly and depressed. As

1598-452: The latter is the class 9 noun prefix in- , which ends in a homorganic nasal. Prenasalisation triggers several changes in the following consonant, some of which are phonemic and others allophonic. The changes can be summed as follows: Zulu has tonic assimilation : high tones tend to spread allophonically to following low-tone syllables, raising their pitch to a level just below that of adjacent high-tone syllables. A toneless syllable between

1645-415: The latter without the h . Nouns are written with their prefixes as one orthographical word. If the prefix ends with a vowel (as most do) and the noun stem also begins with a vowel, a hyphen is inserted in between, e.g. i-Afrika . This occurs only with loanwords. Here are some of the main features of Zulu: The root can be combined with several prefixes and thus create other words. For example, here

1692-507: The liberation war with Mozambique the Songea area was a restricted zone and occasionally suffered aerial attacks by Portuguese forces. Its remoteness made it vulnerable to ivory poaching, and communications remained unreliable until 1985 when a new British funded road was opened linking it northwards to the road and rail hub of Makambako . Songea became a municipality in 2006. Songea is the home to many educational institutions including; Songea

1739-530: The pattern of tones acts more like a template to assign tones to individual syllables, rather than a direct representation of the pronounced tones themselves. Consequently, the relationship between underlying tone patterns and the tones that are pronounced can be quite complex. Underlying high tones tend to surface rightward from the syllables where they are underlyingly present, especially in longer words. The breathy consonant phonemes in Zulu are depressor consonants or depressors for short. Depressor consonants have

1786-599: The population), and it is understood by over 50% of its population. It became one of South Africa's 12 official languages in 1994. According to Ethnologue , it is the second-most widely spoken of the Bantu languages , after Swahili . Like many other Bantu languages, it is written with the Latin alphabet . In South African English , the language is often referred to in its native form, isiZulu . Zulu migrant populations have taken it to adjacent regions, especially Zimbabwe , where

1833-471: The preceding syllable, resulting in a falling tone contour. For example, the English word spoon was borrowed into Zulu as isipunu , phonemically /ísipúnu/ . The second syllable si assimilates to the surrounding high tones, raising its pitch, so that it is pronounced [ísípʼúːnù] sentence-finally. If tone pitch is indicated with numbers, with 1 highest and 9 lowest pitch, then the pitches of each syllable can be denoted as 2-4-3-9. The second syllable

1880-840: The raiding party could not have been far off, I proposed to the men to follow them up at once, and try to release the prisoners, but they were disheartened by the misfortune that so suddenly had overtaken them. The Ngoni people celebrate a festival of first fruits known as Nc'wala in late February at Mutenguleni about 25km from Chipata. Fifteen folk tales of the Ngoni, as retold by an old Ngoni man who had heard them from his grandmother, written down by Margaret Read and edited by Geraldine Elliot, were published in London in 1939. There have been many reprint editions in both America and UK. [REDACTED] Media related to Ngoni people at Wikimedia Commons Zulu language Zulu ( / ˈ z uː l uː / ZOO -loo ), or isiZulu as an endonym ,

1927-439: The regular pattern. Like almost all other Bantu and other African languages , Zulu is tonal . There are three main tonemes : low, high and falling. Zulu is conventionally written without any indication of tone, but tone can be distinctive in Zulu. For example, the words "priest" and "teacher" are both spelt umfundisi , but they are pronounced with different tones: /úm̩fúndisi/ for the "priest" meaning, and /úm̩fundísi/ for

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1974-594: The rest of Africa. The Nguni people have coexisted with other Southern tribes like the San and Khoi. Zulu, like most indigenous Southern African languages, was not a written language until the arrival of missionaries from Europe, who documented the language using the Latin script . The first grammar book of the Zulu language was published in Norway in 1850 by the Norwegian missionary Hans Schreuder . The first written document in Zulu

2021-729: Was a Bible translation that appeared in 1883. In 1901, John Dube (1871–1946), a Zulu from Natal, created the Ohlange Institute, the first native educational institution in South Africa. He was also the author of Insila kaShaka , the first novel written in Zulu (1930). Another pioneering Zulu writer was Reginald Dhlomo , author of several historical novels of the 19th-century leaders of the Zulu nation: U-Dingane (1936), U-Shaka (1937), U-Mpande (1938), U-Cetshwayo (1952) and U-Dinizulu (1968). Other notable contributors to Zulu literature include Benedict Wallet Vilakazi and, more recently, Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali . The written form of Zulu

2068-595: Was controlled by the Zulu Language Board of KwaZulu-Natal . This board has now been disbanded and superseded by the Pan South African Language Board which promotes the use of all eleven official languages of South Africa. English, Dutch and later Afrikaans had been the only official languages used by all South African governments before 1994. However, in the Kwazulu bantustan , the Zulu language

2115-556: Was courted by the Portuguese and British . The British South Africa Company of Cecil Rhodes sent agents to obtain a treaty— Alfred Sharpe in 1889, and Joseph Maloney in 1895, who were both unsuccessful. In 1897, with over 4,000 warriors, Mpezeni rose up against the British, who were taking control of Nyasaland and North-Eastern Rhodesia , and was defeated. Mpezeni signed the treaty which allowed him to rule as Paramount Chief of

2162-515: Was to indicate the implosive /ɓ/ using the special letter ɓ , while the digraph bh would then be simply written as b . Some references may also write h after letters to indicate that they are of the depressor variety, e.g. mh , nh , yh , a practice that is standard in Xhosa orthography. Very early texts, from the early 20th century or before, tend to omit the distinction between plain and aspirated voiceless consonants, writing

2209-585: Was widely used. All education in the country at the high school level was in English or Afrikaans. Since the fall of apartheid in 1994, Zulu has been enjoying a marked revival. Zulu-language television was introduced by the SABC in the early 1980s and it broadcasts news and many shows in Zulu. Zulu radio is very popular and newspapers such as isoLezwe , Ilanga and UmAfrika in the Zulu language are available in Kwazulu-Natal province and Johannesburg . In January 2005

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