Доклады Международного конгресса ИИСАА. Т. 1

I. African Studies / Африканистика 38 Proceedings of the International Congress on Historiography and Source Studies of Asia and Africa.Vol. I. 2020 The above statement from the Oxford Dictionaries Online contains one point that needs to be challenged. The Swahili slogan standardly written as harambee is not normally pronounced as /həˈrambiː/ , but as /haramˈbeː/ . The pronunciation /həˈrambiː/ seems to be an angli- cised interpretation. This is suggested not only by the use of an unstressed / ə / (schwa) in the first syllable and the indication ( ˈ) of relatively greater stress on the medial syllable, but especially by the pronunciation as /i:/ rather than /e:/ in the third syllable. Adouble e in Swahili is pronounced as a lengthened e , not as a shift to the letter  i . If an English speaker sees a foreign expression Harambee , she/he is inclined to interpret it as Harambii . In fact, the Swahili expression would be more appropriately pronounced by a normal English speaker if it were spelt * Harambay or *Harambey . English speakers have a handicap when faced with ee and oo in other languages. This handicap resulted from a ‘Great Vowel Shift’ in English which occurred between the time of Chaucer in 1400 and the time of Shakespeare in 1600. Since that time, English speakers have tended to mispronounce ee as though it were ii and oo as though it were uu when they observe other languages. Since the peculiarities of English spelling now influence people around the world, my preferred solution would be never to use ee and oo in writing systems for languages such as Nubian. Even such a well established language as Swahili is still subject to misinterpretation when observed by a speaker of English. Sabbar pointed out a Nubian equivalent to the Harambee of Swahili. I have a copy of it written in his own hand as follows: To avoid English misconceptions, ee could be replaced with ey as follows: Heyla-hóp ! If people were moving a boat, they grasped the rope with the first two syllables ‘Heyla’ and pulled together when they shouted ‘ Hóp ’. Sabbar’s acute accent above Hóp could have indicated both high tone and stress. This expression may well have originated in the context of the Arabic language. A song of this name was popular in Cairo with a musical group called Wust El-Balad: ‘“ HelaHop”—4:21 (An expression used inArabic tomotivate people doing a hard job)’. 1 1 Wust El-Balad — Wikipedia. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wust_El-Balad (accessed 21 May 2019); Wust El Balad. Hela Hop — وسط البلد هيلا هوب YouTube. URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI4DgptXLOI (accessed 21 May 2019).