Page 25 - SoMJ Vol 74 - No 1, 2021

Chichewa words in the Polyglotta Africana 15

The transcription
Koelle’s transcription is phonetic rather than phonemic. That is, he aimed simply
to write down what he heard, without trying to analyse it further. For example,
although Chichewa has five vowel phonemes, Koelle wrote them with seven
different vowels; he also wrote the /l~r/ phoneme sometimes with ‘l’ and
sometimes ‘r’. The numerous diacritics aim to be exact, but in fact there are faults
in his transcription. He had difficulty in hearing the difference between /p/ and
/ph/, /t/ and /th/, /k/ and /kh/, /s/ and /z/, /ts/ and /dz/, /c/ and /j/, /f/ and /v/, and
tended to write each pair the same way. Despite this, the words are usually
recognisable, and the wordlist is useful.
The system of transcription is Koelle’s own. Koelle later wrote that he would
like to have used Karl Lepsius’s standard alphabet, but that at the time of writing
it had not been published:

I much regret that this System was not propounded sooner, so that I might
also have adopted it in my Vei-Grammar and Polyglotta Africana. Happily,
however, the Orthography which I employed in those books already so
nearly approaches the System of Prof. Lepsius, as to only require some
8
minor alterations.

Koelle worked fast, completing all 200 languages and dialects in six months,
which means that he must have interviewed at least one informant per day. For
this reason, it is unlikely that he had time for phonemic analysis, or to attune his
ear to small differences in sound in any one language.

Vowels
Koelle transcribed his words using a system of seven vowels: i e ẹ a ọ o u. Unlike
9
in Lepsius’ system the dotted e and o were open, rather than closed, vowels.
Koelle occasionally used the undotted e and o to spell the sounds /i/ and /u/, e.g.
tséla (dzira) ‘egg’, búlōs (búluzi) ‘lizard’.
A macron above the vowels shows that they are long: ā, ē and so on. In most
words it is the penultimate vowel which is marked long, but there are a few where
the antepenultimate vowel is so marked, e.g. mā·fúta (mafúta) ‘oil’, mā·pī́la
(mapira) ‘guinea-corn’. Surprisingly, a long mark is also often added where the
sound is ‘w’ or ‘y’: kī́n·gūẹ (chingwe) ‘rope’, mā ́ limṓẹ (malimwe) ‘dry season’,
10
tsākū̄́dīa (zákúdyá) ‘foods’. A dot after a vowel, as in mā·fúta, shows
nasalisation.

8 Koelle, African Native Literature, ed. Dalby (1968), p. ix.
9 In this system of seven vowels Koelle was following a standard alphabet proposed in
1848 by Henry Venn of the Church Missionary Society. See John Spencer, ‘S. W. Koelle
and the Problem of Notation for African Languages, 1847-1855’. Sierra Leone Language
Review 5 (1966), pp. 83–105.
10 Rebmann in a few such words writes a breve over the vowel, e.g. kimwémŭe