Talk:List of English words of Niger-Congo origin

Etymonline
Is a great source of etymologies, but unfortunately it is not dynamic. I have been using it for 2 years and essentially there have been no updates. The same errors or disputes are still there. Samba is clearly an african word, the culture, history, dance, etymology are all consistent with its african origins. In this case online etymology gets it wrong. etymonline was the hobby of one individual. This i recall because the webhosting company had once attempted to shut down the website because it was getting too many hits for the amount of money he was paying. He made an appeal and i guess someone bailed him out. It is a good source of information but it is not definitive. All evidence is consitent with samba being a bantu word. it was started by afro-brazillians. Similar words, dances, and music exist in africa. All other wikipedia articles indicate it is an african word. the issue of it being a portuguese word is kind of random. there is no history or any other supporting evidence to corroborate this.

according to this article zamacueca has no relation to samba and is a peruvian dance/music. http://www.lafi.org/magazine/articles/bombo.html

Here is more info. According to online etymology Samba is from the word Zambacueca or zamacueca. The zamacueca is an Afro-Peruvian dance that is the precursor to the Zamba, the argentine national dance. It is also related to the cueca. These dances originated with africans who travelled with the conquistadors to peru. These dances are unrelated to the samba. see Zamba. Interestingly the etymology of Zambacueca leads us back to africa. and to the same word semba.

There is more information on zamacueca on spanish websites.
 * spanish wikipedia
 * memoria chilena
 * viva la cueaca

Online etymology is basically incorrect. It implies that Zambacueca is from portuguese when in fact it is spanish. The word does not exist in portuguese.

I removed this entry
 * coffee - Ethiopian

from the list, because it should be listed under Arabic origin. Unless there is an origin in the semitic languages generally, taking it into sub Saharan Africa. The coffee plant is from Ethiopia.

User:Chifumbe I think it should be included because ultimately the nae could have originated from Kaffa region in Ethiopia, where the plant ie originally from.

Jumbo
Source? Rich  Farmbrough 10:31, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Yam origin?
I was wondering if the "yam" word origin was regarding the yam (vegetable), some other meaning of yam, or just the word in general? I'm just wondering regarding fixing the link so it links to the proper article, not the disambiguation page (or stays linking to the disambiguation page if that is correct). Thanks -- Natalya 03:19, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Taken care of - -it is the vegetable.--Hraefen 15:38, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Fantastic, thanks. -- Natalya 19:37, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Hraefen, you need to cite a source. The OED claims that there is no certain origin. What can be sourced is that Yam (with the defintion To eat, esp. with relish.) is West Arfican).--Commander Keane 00:55, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

Source: *"Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua española" by Guido Gómez de Silva (ISBN 968-16-2812-8)
 * ñame= yam, of West African origin, possibly related to Fulani nyami "to eat."--Hraefen 15:34, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Um, that source doesn't give the definition. How do you know that are talking about the vegetable?--Commander Keane 05:09, 19 January 2006 (UTC)


 * I don't have it on me right now, but it does refer to the vegetable. Do you want me to write out the full definition in Spanish, translated into English, or both?  The ISBN is cited if this is a very pressing concern for you.--Hraefen 21:22, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
 * That's fine.--Commander Keane 03:40, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Afrikaans
Afrikaans is a Germanic language originating from the Dutch spoken by settlers in the seventeenth century[2] and thus is classified as a Low Franconian West Germanic. It has nothing to do with Africa no more than English is an African language. Do not include words from European languages under the cat of African. If that is the case then we would have to include Arabic as has been spoken in Africa for 1000s of years and is ultimately an Afro-Asiatic languages. Therefore it has more arguments for being here. --Halqh حَلَقَة הלכהሐላቃህ (talk) 17:37, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

People migrate. Arabic is, of course, a language of Africa. Afrikaans is a language of South Africa (the Zulu arrived in South Africa much later than the Arabs conquered North Africa, so if Arabic is "intrusive" to North Africa, Bantu is even more recently intrusive in South Africa).

Anyway, it is pointless to group etymologies as "African". We group etymologies by linguistic phyla, not by continent. I.e "Indo-European" and "Afro-Asiatic" is meaningful, "European", "Asian" or "African" is not. As all examples given were Niger-Congo anyway, I did the sensible thing and named the page after its content. That doesn't mean it's ok to keep this stuff around on Wikipedia without citing references (I also had to remove a few bogus entries (including "bogus"), but I left in the plausible ones for now). --dab (𒁳) 19:12, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on List of English words of Niger-Congo origin. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20070429120637/http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/history/hs_es_languages.htm to http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/history/hs_es_languages.htm

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 21:14, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on List of English words of Niger-Congo origin. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20120405135357/http://galvestondailynews.com/story.lasso?ewcd=bccbfd7340717bed to http://galvestondailynews.com/story.lasso?ewcd=bccbfd7340717bed

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 05:38, 25 December 2017 (UTC)