Koko haidari mai

 

Methali (proverb)

Koko haidari mai.   

- The koko is never reached by water.

Mkoko is a tree that grows inside water but its branches are high therefore they never touch the water.

As a saying, it is said of a wise person, who always has something in reserve.

Mkoko/Mkandaa (Red Mangrove) Rhizophora mangle, is a salt-tolerant, evergreen tropical tree that is easily identified by the remarkable aboveground prop roots that transport air to their waterlogged belowground roots. The tangled network of prop roots helps to anchor them in soft sediments of the ocean-bed. In the tropics, red mangroves grow to more than 80 feet (24 meters) in height. In temperate climates like the U.S., however, the trees rarely grow beyond 20 feet (6 meters), which gives them a shrub-like appearance. They are sometimes called “walking trees” because their continuously growing prop roots make them look like they are walking on water.

The tree’s red timber can be used to make premium-grade furniture. The red bark is used to manufacture red dye as well as a chemical that prevents animal hide from rotting before processing to leather.

People living along coastlines with healthy mangrove forests receive great benefits from the trees. During intense storms, mangrove forests act as a buffer, reducing wave action, preventing erosion, and absorbing floodwaters.

“Haidari” is the negation of dara. Dara – 1. touch gently especially in a sensual manner. 2 test something; tempt somebody.

Mai is the Kiamu dialect for Maji in standardized Kiswahili. It translates to water in English.

The most easily reducible languages to an anthropological characterization or mischaracterization, as the case may be, are fundamentally artificial languages. A phenomenon mostly found in Caucasian languages with the most prominent example being Esperanto. Languages that are fundamentally natural, encompassing various context clues to give meaning, are hard to characterize or mischaracterize and are mostly to be found in sub-Saharan Africa. One metric that can be used to show this is evidential markers.

Evidential markers

In linguistics, evidentiality is, broadly, the indication of the nature of evidence for a given statement; that is, whether evidence exists for the statement and if so, what kind. An evidential marker is defined as the particular grammatical element (affix, clitic, or particle) that indicates evidentiality.

European languages

European languages (such as Germanic and Romance languages) often indicate evidential-type information through modal verbs (Spanish: deber de, Dutch: zouden, Danish: skulle, German: sollen) or other lexical words (adverbials, English: reportedly) or phrases (English: it seems to me). The elements in European languages indicating the information source are optional and usually do not indicate evidentiality as their primary function, thus they do not form a grammatical category. The obligatory elements of grammatical evidentiality systems may be translated into English, variously, as I hear that, I see that, I think that, as I hear, as I can see, as far as I understand, they say, it is said, it seems, it seems to me that, it looks like, it appears that, it turns out that, alleged, stated, allegedly, reportedly, obviously, etc.

Pomo and Japanese

Languages that directly express grammatical evidentiality such as through affixes, clitics, or particles include Japanese which has inferential evidentials and reportive markers that are realized as suffixes on a variety of mainly verbal predicates, and as grammaticalized nouns. In another example, Eastern Pomo language has four evidential suffixes that are added to verbs: -ink’e (nonvisual sensory), -ine (inferential), -·le (hearsay), and -ya (direct knowledge).

Evidentials in Eastern Pomo (McLendon 2003)

Evidential type	Example verb	Translation
Nonvisual sensory	pʰa·békʰ-ink’e	"burned" [speaker felt the sensation]
Inferential	pʰa·bék-ine	"must have burned" [speaker saw circumstantial evidence]
Hearsay (reportage)	pʰa·békʰ-·le	"burned, they say" [speaker is reporting what was told]
Direct knowledge	pʰa·bék-a	"burned" [speaker has direct evidence, probably visual]

This direct merging of evidentiality into statements makes them directly consequential to the epistemic modality of the statements. Epistemic modality is the nature, origin, scope and justification of information that determines its credibility or validity. This has direct implications on the pragmatics of the language. For example, a person who makes a false statement qualified as a personally observed fact will probably be considered to have lied; a person who makes a false statement qualified as a belief may be considered mistaken.

To express these pragmatic implications in a “linguistically neutral” fashion, a scientific experiment is needed. For example, A. Aksu-Koç et al. (2005) conducted an “unexpected contents task” experiment with 3 & 4 year olds. In this task, the child is shown a familiar candy box(smarties) and is asked what he thinks is in it. After his answer (typically correct: candy), the box is opened to reveal pebbles instead, and then it is closed. To assess understanding of representational change, the child is asked what he thought was in the box before it was opened; if he answers “pebbles” he fails, if he answers “candy”, he passes. The fail is an example of false statement qualified as observed fact (familiarity breeds from observation). If he fails, he is considered to have lied. Next, to assess false statement of belief, the child is asked what a friend who did not see the contents of the box would think is in it; if he answers “pebbles”, he fails, if he answers “candy”, he passes. If he fails, he is considered to be mistaken.

An adult presented with that simple challenge would know that it is possible for anything smaller or equal in volume to that box (as long as it is inelastic), and of reasonable density, temperature and chemical stability to be inside it.

Bantu languages (ex. Kiswahili)

In Bantu languages, evidential markers are not usually immediately apparent. They are neither affixes to words like in Japanese and Pomo, nor derived from different grammatical categories like in European languages. This makes them hard to detect for speakers of other languages that attempt to study these languages without actually immersing themselves in the semantics(meaning) of statements which is encoded in the relevance of events during utterance and the pragmatics(power relations) of statements’ makers and interpreters which is encoded in the source of the information. Context, familiarity, experience, agency, are therefore very important in the whole construction of evidentiality. For example, we may take a hunter as speaker in two contexts:

-- Context 1 (Agent – unknown):

The speaker sees a rabbit lying on the road. He goes to investigate and finds that it is trapped in a snare.

“huyu sungura amekamatwa.”

“This rabbit has been snared.”

-- Context 2 (Agent - speaker):

The speaker has snared a rabbit with his trap.

“sungura amekamatwa.”

“The rabbit has been snared.”

The difference in these two statements lends credence to evidence of who might have or might not have  been agent in snaring the rabbit. In context 1, the speaker is not deemed to be the agent who snared the rabbit while in context 2, the speaker is deemed to be the agent that snared the rabbit.

There are other varied examples where various categories of evidentiality emerge and merge to determine credibility depending on words used, tonal variation, events, nature of rhetoric (descriptive, reportive) and so on. All these and more have implications whether the medium is oral or written. It is as varied as the prop roots of a red mangrove tree.

References

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y.; Dixon, R. M. W. (2003). Studies in Evidentiality. John Benjamins Publishing.

Gunnink, Hilde. (2018). A Grammar of Fwe: A Bantu language of Zambia and Namibia. PhD thesis, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.

Guo Jiansheng, et al. (2009). Crosslinguistic Approaches to the Psychology of Language: Research in the Tradition of Dan Isaac Slobin. 1st Edition

McLendon, Sally (2003). 5. Evidentials in Eastern Pomo with a comparative survey of the category in other Pomoan languages. In Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. and Dixon, R.M.W. (eds.), Studies in Evidentiality, 101-129.

Narrog, Heiko; Yang, Wenjiang (2018). In Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y (ed.). "Evidentiality in Japanese". The Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality. pp. 708–724

TUKI (2001), Kamusi Ya Kiswahili-Kiingereza; Swahili-English Dictionary. Published by Taasisi ya Uchunguzi wa Kiswahili (TUKI), Chuo Kikuu cha Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.