End of ADS-L Digest - 23 Dec 1997 to 24 Dec 1997
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Subject: ADS-L Digest - 24 Dec 1997 to 25 Dec 1997

There are 3 messages totalling 238 lines in this issue.

Topics of the day:

 1. Season's Greetings
 2. Canuck (part two)
 3. AMISTAD anachronisms

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Date:  Thu, 25 Dec 1997 00:10:18 -0500
From:  Alan Baragona <baragonasa[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]VAX.VMI.EDU>
Subject: Re: Season's Greetings

Laurence Horn wrote:
>

> Not sure, but it might be worth remembering that this traditional holiday
> was initated by Ron Karenga of UCLA during the late 1960's (I was there at
> the time); I believe he later adopted a different first name (Maulana?).
> Actually, his choice of the -aa spelling would be appropriate, now that I
> think of it, since the holiday is presumably named not for the verb
> _kwanza_ 'to begin', but for its nominal derivative _kwanzaa_ 'first fruits
> of the harvest'. But if I recall my Swahili, the universal penultimate
> stress of the language extends to double vowels, so that it "should" then
> be pronounced kwanZAa and it never is. The -aa final is not un-African in
> any case; certainly it's not particularly rare in Swahili, although it may
> occur more frequently in Arabic loans.
>
> Larry

That's interesting. So is RHD simply wrong to spell it <Kwanza>? A
quick search on the web turns up <Kwanzaa> almost exclusively. Even
when I searched for <Kwanza>, I came up with numerous hits, but when I
went to the sites, the spelling still had -aa (so frankly I'm not sure
why I got hits for -a).

Alan