Frequently Asked Questions

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These are some of the frequently asked questions relating to the linguistic connections between the Ancient Egyptian and Bantu languages of Africa.

 

THE KISWAHILI-BANTU RESEARCH UNIT FOR

THE ADVANCEMENT OF THE ANCIENT

 EGYPTIAN LANGUAGE

How did you discover the linguistic connection between the Ancient   Egyptian and Bantu languages of Africa?

 I began to analyse the sentence given by Sir Alan Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar, page 36 , 'ra m pt' which means 'the sun is in the sky'. The symboldenotes an owl and represents the consonant 'm' which is a preposition and means 'in'. I quickly realised that this preposition is equivalent to similar Bantu forms, given as 'mu', '-mo' and in particular to the Kiswahili-Bantu form 'imo', which means 'it is in'. The Ancient Egyptian preposition 'm' was the first indicator that there had to be a linguistic connection between the languages for as far as I can recall, no other language uses this preposition.

What other indicators did you look for?

Well the word for a serpent given as, 'nik'fitted the Kiswahili-Bantu word 'nioka' which means a serpent. This word gives an exact match and encouraged me to look for more words.

 Were there other similar words?

 Yes, I began exploring many more words which had similar meanings in Bantu and Ancient Egyptian. These are included in what I call 'The Bantu Rosetta Stones'.

 Some people say that a linguistic link is impossible as the Ancient Egyptian language is an Afro-Asiatic language and not a Bantu language.

Well, all I can say is that I have proved them wrong, especially when you look at the amount of vocabulary explored. I have not seen any websites or books which give substantial amounts of common vocabularies between the languages. Put simply the Afro-Asiatic language is misleading to consider at this stage. Give me the evidence which shows that the Afro-Asiatic language can match up with the exact vocabularies provided including vowels and consonants.

 What is a Bantu language and to which part of Africa do they belong?

 Bantu languages belong to the wider group of languages called Niger-Congo. See the map. All Bantu languages are related. 

Map courtesy Wikipedia

showing the Bantu distribution within the wider group of Niger-Congo group of languages.

 Map showing the approximate distribution of Bantu vs. other Niger-Congo languages.

The Kiswahili-Bantu language is not a Bantu language for it consists of a lot of Semitic words.

True, but you must not forget that the Semitic language had its origins in Africa, therefore the Kiswahili-Bantu language has acquired Semitic roots of words. However the words I have recently investigated contain purely Bantu roots. Let's not make a mistake, the Kiswahili-Bantu language is a Bantu language and has maintained a substantial amount of its Proto-Bantu roots.

by Ferg Somo © 18th May 2008

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