Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 June 21

= June 21 =

"Peppersass"
The first Mount Washington Cog Railway locomotive has been nicknamed "Peppersass" for its likeness to a pepper sauce bottle: However, does the spelling "sass" probably reflect the modern meaning of sass, and if yes, in what way? If no, what else might have been the reason for this spelling? --KnightMove (talk) 07:23, 21 June 2015 (UTC)
 * The words "sauce" and "sass" both derive from "salsa". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 09:34, 21 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Besides being the usual spelling used nowadays (though not in The Lord of the Rings) when the "impudence" sense of sauce is meant, sass, in pronunciation if not necessarily in spelling, is a fairly common (in the U.S.) variant of sauce in its other senses. It's covered, with examples, in the Dictionary of American Regional English s.v. sauce. What was in the mind(s) of the locomotive namer(s) is, of course, unknowable absent some specific comment; but there seems no reason to suppose that a reference to impudence was intended. Deor (talk) 13:35, 21 June 2015 (UTC)


 * In other words, assume pudence unless contraindicated. --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  21:42, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Gahuza language?
There is apparently a new concept: the "Gahuza language", made up of Kinyarwanda and Kirundi, the official languages of Rwanda and Burundi respectively, which both belong to the Rwanda-Rundi group of languages, maybe in the same way that there have been proposals to create the concept of a "Nguni language" which would collect into the concept of a unified language all of the Nguni languages (Xhosa, Zulu, Swazi, ...)

The strange thing is the concept of a "Gahuza language" seems to be used  exclusively  by the BBC World Service: Gahuza service.

How new is the concept? Who else than the BBC uses it? I can't find anything on the Web.

Also (if you know either Kinyarwanda or Kirundi) are texts, podcasts, etc in the two standards mixed on the web site? I don't suppose that the BBC World Service has manufactured in this short a time a "Standard Gahuza" half-way between them, so that I suppose in practice the two languages are used concurrently as representatives of that unified concept, but I would like to verify that fact with someone who knows (one of) those two languages.

I've found another Web site connected with Rwanda and Burundi using the term "Gahuza", namely www.gahuza.com, but I can't tell if they use it in a linguistic capacity. In any case that site is in French without any texts in either Kinyarwanda or Kirundi.

Contact Basemetal   here  07:31, 21 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Is the BBC using Gahuza to refer to a language or something else? For example here it says "BBC Great Lakes service – Gahuzamiryango, or "bringing people together" – provides two daily 30-minute programmes in Kinyarwanda/Kirundi for a massive audience in Rwanda, Burundi and neighbouring countries." Hzh (talk) 13:59, 21 June 2015 (UTC)
 * All I know is they use "Gahuza" as a term for their combined Kinyarwanda and Kirundi site. I had assumed that it was the name of a language. But I might have been too hasty. That's why I asked. I have not seen the BBC explicitly use "Gahuza" to refer to a language. Contact Basemetal   here  14:46, 21 June 2015 (UTC)
 * The BBC uses whichever that is convenient, sometimes it gives the language, or the country, or something else (e.g. Mundo for Latin America, BBC in this Chinese site, News (I think) for the Scottish Gaelic service). There is also no reference to Gahuza as a language here. You can always contact the BBC if you want to be certain (or ask the person who wrote the blog post in the previous link). Hzh (talk) 15:25, 21 June 2015 (UTC)
 * There are other news sites from this part of Africa that use the word gahuza, so presumably it simply means "news". Adam Bishop (talk) 10:18, 22 June 2015 (UTC)
 * I think it is interesting that the BBC blog I gave talks about how to use words that won't confuse the speakers of either Kinyarwanda or Kirundi. So whatever Gahuza may mean, its particular style may become a standard for speaker of the two languages.   Who knows, Gahuza may indeed become a language in itself, as created by the BBC. Hzh (talk) 20:53, 22 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Gahuza means something like "unifying factor", according to a native Kinyarwanda speaker 196.12.131.14 (talk) 07:37, 18 July 2023 (UTC)
 * It seems that "gahuza" means bridge-maker, bridge, and is derived from "guhuza", which means to unite, to reconcile (ResearchSpace of the University of KwaZulu-Natal as a source). But another article from ACL Anthology identifies Gahuza as a "code-mixed language consisting of Kinyarwanda and Kirundi". --IBAnk (talk) 16:09, 14 November 2023 (UTC)