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Luba

 
Dictionary: Lu·ba   (lū'bə) pronunciation
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n., pl., Luba, or -bas.
  1. A member of a Bantu people inhabiting southeast Congo (formerly Zaire).
  2. The Bantu language of this people. Also called Tshiluba.

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Luba
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Female Luba ancestral statue of carved wood; in the Musée de l'Homme, Paris.
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Female Luba ancestral statue of carved wood; in the Musée de l'Homme, Paris. (credit: Courtesy of the Musee de l'Homme, Paris)
Cluster of some 5.6 million Bantu-speaking peoples who share a common political history surrounding the Luba-Lunda states. They are savanna and forest dwellers who hunt and gather, engage in agriculture, and keep livestock; they also fish intensively in the Congo and its tributaries. They have associations for hunting, magic, and medicine and a well-developed oral tradition that includes epic cycles. Two groups are noted as wood-carvers.

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WordNet: Luba
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Note: click on a word meaning below to see its connections and related words.

The noun has one meaning:

Meaning #1: a Bantu language spoken in southern Zaire

Wikipedia: Tshiluba language
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"Tshiluba" redirects here. For the Zambian president, see Frederick Chiluba.
Tshiluba
Spoken in Democratic Republic of the Congo
Region Kasai-Occidental and Kasai-Oriental provinces
Total speakers 6,300,000 (1991)
Language family Niger-Congo
Language codes
ISO 639-1 None
ISO 639-2 lua
ISO 639-3 lua
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Tshiluba (also called Luba-Kasai and Luba-Lulua) is a Bantu language spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where it is a national language.

Contents

Classification

Tshiluba belongs to the Bantu branch of the Niger-Congo languages. It is the language of the Baluba people.

Geographic distribution

Tshiluba is spoken by about 6.3 million people in the Kasaï Occidental and Kasaï Oriental provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Dialects

There are significant dialect differences between the East Kasai Region (Luba people) and the West Kasai Region (Bena Lulua people).

Vocabulary

The Bantu word identified in June 2004 by Today's Translations, a British translation company, as the most untranslatable in the world: ilunga, in the Tshiluba tongue, means "a person ready to forgive any abuse the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time". However, it is more likely to be a personal name rather than a difficult word.

Sources

  • MacIntyre, Ben. Why do Koreans say 'a biscuit would be nice' instead of 'I want a biscuit'?, The Times, August 21, 2004.

External links

This Niger-Congo languages-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

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Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
WordNet. WordNet 1.7.1 Copyright © 2001 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Tshiluba language".  Read more