HomeOld_PostsSimilarities between Shona and Shemitic Languages: Part Three…previously Ethiopians had wholly Bantu...

Similarities between Shona and Shemitic Languages: Part Three…previously Ethiopians had wholly Bantu language

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IN Arabia, we find many similarities between Shemitic and Bantu languages, particularly in terms of grammar.
The prefix ‘mu’, which indicates the person affected or doing an act in typical Bantu languages like Shona is very much evident in Arabic.
For example, the word for struggle is ‘jihad’ and to say the one who struggles in Arabic, one simply says ‘Mu-jahiddeen’.
This is similar to how in Shona we say ‘murimi’ to describe one who farms (rima) for a living.
There is also a connection between Arabic and Shona in the way words transform to suit the context in which they are spoken.
In Arabic, ‘shahada’ means testimony.
To say ‘he has testified’ in Arabic, one says ‘wa-shaduwa’ which would be said as ‘a-shadura’ in Shona.
Many of the foreign words in the Remba ancestral language, greetings and names are Arabic and/or Hebrew in origin and continue to be used among initiated vaRemba.
Some words, however, came out of the Shona linguistic arsenal and were incorporated into Arabic.
For example, the Arabic word for lion is ‘sumah’.
This was derived from ‘shumba’ and can be found in names like ‘Osama’ meaning the lion.
Similarly, in sanskrit lion is called ‘simha’ and this was derived from ‘simba’ which is lion in Swahili.
In China it is called ‘shi’ which also hints to an African origin of the word.
This makes sense because lions can only be found in their natural state in Africa, thus the retention of the Bantu name for lion in different parts of Asia.
This is similar to how the word ‘munhu’, meaning human, was exported by the earliest inhabitants of Asia who used it to refer to themselves.
They were blacks and flourished in south-east Asia and are remembered as the ‘Mon’ (munhu) rom the Khmer Dynasty.
Asian words like ‘monastery’ and ‘monsoon’, among others were derived from this word ‘munhu’.
‘Khmer’ may have been derived from ‘khem’ which means ‘Ham’ (nations).
Swahili is a derivative from an eastern Bantu language resembling chiShona, kiRundi, kinyaRuwanda, chiChewa and the Shemitic language of Arabic.
This emulsification of languages took place at the Swahili coast which is located at the eastern most point of south east sub-Saharan Africa and in close proximity to Arabia.
Trade, travel, intermarriage and other forms of social interaction between the inhabitants of this region led to the emergence of Swahili.
This shows how harmonic a Shemitic language can blend into a Hamitic one.
Now we find words like ‘peace’ being spoken as ‘saramu’ from the Arabic ‘salam’ instead of more authentic Bantu words like ‘rugare’.
Yet bantu words like ‘maoko’ (hands), ‘kuona’ (seeing), ‘mbwa’ (dog), ‘mombe’ (cow) and ‘mwedzi’ (moon), among others, are the dominant source of Swahili diction. However, the most striking link between Shemitic and Hamitic language is in the Ethiopic script which is used for writing Ge’ez, Amharic and Tiriginya.
The writing is straight out of the Sabaic script of ancient southern Arabia.
Sabaic can be seen on the walls of the Machema site in Mapungubwe, South Africa.
This site was built in approximately 700 CE and its construction predates the Great Zimbabwe by three centuries.
The existence of a writing at that time debunks the lie that Africans were illiterate till the coming of whites.
Sabaic was derived from Paleo or Phoenician Hebrew and its predecessor proto Shemitic script.
It predates classical, square or Aramaic Hebrew.
Ethiopia’s adaptation of Hebrew writing in approximately 1000 BCE came along with the Hebrew lineage of Menyelek, son of Solomon and Makeda.
Makeda was the then queen of Ethiopia (Africa besides Egypt) and Sheba (Arabia).
Names like ‘Jah’ (Yah), the short version of the Hebrew name of God and the ark of the covenant were also among the Hebrew things that were absorbed by Ethiopia.
The ark was called Zion by the Ethiopians and ‘lungundu’ (the lord’s) by the ancestors of the Remba who lived in Saba (southern Arabia).
In fact, the name Yemen was derived from ‘amin’ which is Arabic for ‘trust’.
This was because, according to Ethiopian tradition, Saba is the only other place the ark was set besides Axum in Ethiopia. Axum was also named Zion after the ark. Because the Ethiopians had a wholly Bantu language prior to the coming of the Hebrew people, they modified the script to suit the Ethiopian alphabet.
Like Shona, Ethiopic words are typically made up of consonants like ‘b-c-d-f-g’ and the vowel ends ‘a-e-i-o-u’.
Ethiopic also has complex word components like ‘bwa, tsva’ and ‘ngwe’ which can hardly be found in other languages besides Shona.
These they write in ancient Hebrew characters which have been allocated logical vowel markers.
However, even after thousands of years, it is easy to see the Hebrew origins of the Ethiopic script.
It has only gotten richer with time and is more authentic than modern Hebrew which is essentially Aramaic.
Ethiopic is the most adoptable writing for Shona or any other Bantu language.
It was used by the ancestors of the current inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa in ancient times and thus would be appropriate if reintroduced to contemporary Africans.
English does not stress vowels and requires the expression of words in phonetics such as ‘a’, ‘b’ and ‘c’.
This makes words like Zimbabwe appear to be eight-letter words instead of a three character word read as ‘Zi-mba-bwe’.
The latter would be the case if Ethiopic writing were adopted to express Bantu languages. Once the mind is programmed to decipher the characters, reading indigenous languages will become much faster.
Ethiopic has more characters than any other Shemitic script owing to its rich Bantu diction.
Its direct root language, namely Sabaic, had 29 characters and more than half of them were of proto Shemitic and/or Phoenician Hebrew origin.
It was used to form Ethiopic and out of the 29 Sabaic characters that existed, at least 17 of them were used to form the Ethiopic script.
The rest were derived from the earlier scripts, namely proto Shemitic and Phoenician Hebrew.
Past Eurocentric claims of the Ethiopic script having originated from Greek must therefore be excused as false. It is farfetched and there are far less, if any, similarities between the two writings.
The Sabaic script was also used along with the Nabatean and Minao script to produce Arabic.
There are at least two Arabic characters which cannot be found anywhere else but in the Sabaic script.
For example, the letter ‘w’ which is called ‘wa-un’ in Arabic and ‘waw’ in Hebrew.
These numerous similarities should serve as confirmation that there was indeed an ancient brotherhood between Hamites and Shemites.
It also shows that Africans have always had more in common racially, linguistically and culturally with Hebrew people than whites and other Westerners did or will ever have.
This is largely owed to the close proximity shared between the ancient Hebrews and Africans.
Most importantly, the linguistic similarities confirm the movement of Hebrew Israelites to places like Zimbabwe where Hebrew people, names and culture entered and were practiced long before the coming of whites or the Bible to this region.

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