Word: bambara
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...will alphabetize the country. This is the "lightening" approach. More than anything, it aims at developing the most effective ways of teaching illiterates. The language problem enormously complicates the task. In Tanzania, most of the tribes speak or understand Swahili, a written language, but in Mali the predominant language, Bambara, has not yet been transcribed. Also, there are strong arguments for teaching people to read in either English or French, since few bags of fertilizer come with instructions in Bambara...
Even this seems futile. Language is the greatest smuggling operation in the world. When the French blast juke-box as an American atrocity, for example, they might better blame West Africans for the original Bambara word, dzugu (wicked), which evolved into joog (disorderly) in the Gullah language of sea-island Negroes living off Georgia and South Carolina. It is virtually impossible to keep a language "pure." Mustafa Kemal tried it in Turkey, failed for the simple reason that half the Turkish language is borrowed from Arabic and Persian. Mussolini purged Italian of such "foreign" French (but Latin-derived) words...