The Concise Pojulu-English Dictionary: First Edition, 2010

By LB Lokosang

The Pojulu people are part of the Bari-speaking peoples of the present day Central Equatoria State in South Sudan. They are the dominant group of the population of Lainya County-one of the six countries of the state until the time of publication of this Dictionary.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Sep 2, 2010
• ISBN: 9781453563960

LB Lokosang

The author, Mr. Lailà B. Lokosang, was born in 1961 at Lalyo in Lainya County, South Sudan. He attended schools in Lainya, Maridi, Juba and Ed-Dueim in Sudan from 1969 to 1981. He has a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science degrees having attended University education in Sudan, the United Kingdom and South Africa. He is currently studying for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in South Africa. Mr. Lokosang served in various professional capacities as civil servant in his native country and as an expatriate and consultant in Malawi (United Nations and various international organisations). His current preoccupations include writing and contributing opinion newspaper articles and scientific journal articles and consultancies with several organisations and projects.

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Copyright © 2010 by LB Lokosang.

First edition

ISBN:   Softcover   978-1-4535-6395-3

   Ebook   978-1-4535-6396-0

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Contents

Acknowledgement

Preface

Preliminary Notes

Peculiar alphabets

Masculine and feminine adjectives, nouns and gerunds

Non-existing nouns and expressions

Phonetics

Repetition of the first two letter syllable of a word for a continuous tense

Combination of command and indefinite gerunds

Absence of some Latin alphabets

Descriptions of words

Pojulu-English Dictionery

Ancillary 1: Grammatical Note

Introduction

Forms of nouns

Masculine and feminine nouns

Plural and singular nouns

Nouns with no plural forms

Nouns treated as plural

Uncountable nouns with plural forms

The ‘jin’ group

The ‘an’ group

The irregular group

The ‘nit’—‘k’ singular to plural nouns

Verbs

Past and present tenses

Present and past perfect

Present and past continuous

The future tense

The past participle and passive voices

The Passive voice

The ‘nikin’-ending verbs

Command verbs

Action Nouns

Negation and verb stems

Ancillary 2: The Pojulu Numbering System, Ordering, Weekdays and Calendar Months

Numbering system

Number order

Days of the week

Calendar Months

Ancillary 3: Common Pojulu Names

Men’s Names

Names of Girls or Women

Ancillary 4: Names of Parts of the Human Body

Acknowledgement

I want to thank the Right Reverend Bishop Peter Amidi, who took from his valuable time to review the first manuscript. I also treasure the motivation by my friends to proceed with producing this First Edition of the Pojulu-English Dictionary. Worth mention is Professor Sam Laki of Ohio State University in USA, Mr. Lokule Ladowani, the Very Reverent Rufus Lemi and Dr. Monday Elia. A number of other friends encouraged me to continue working and see this work to its end. I say to them ‘thank you’.

I would also like to acknowledge in advance users and reviewers of this publication for their advice on further improvement to the next editions of this Dictionary. Your valuable advice and insight will be soundly acknowledged. May God bless you.

Further, I regard everybody who contributes in popularizing this work or who decides to own a copy of this Dictionary as treasurable friend and my future light. Certainly, the success of any product lies with how many copies are in users’ hands, in bookshelves and office desks. Should that happen, I will be motivated to put more intellectual time into producing new editions and even an English-Pojulu version.

Last but not least, I would like to thank Xlibris for the rigorous professional work on refining the final copy of the Dictionary and for making it a dream come true. Given another time space and means, I will not hesitate to get back to you for quality inspires more interest and zeal.

LB Lokosang,

Author.

Preface

The Pojulu people are part of the Bari-speaking peoples of the present day Central Equatoria State in South Sudan. They are the dominant group of the population of Lainya County—one of the six counties of the state until the time of publication of this Dictionary. The Pojulu is one of the major ethnic groups located west of the Nile. Some of the Pojulu people are in Yei County, who inhabit an area spanning part of South Sudan’s western border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A pocket of the Pojulu people is also found in Terekeka County to the north. According to anthropologists, who wrote extensively about the Sudanic ethnic groups, the Pojulu people originated from the Nilo-Hamitic ethnic clusters. Culturally the Pojulu share a lot in common with the rest of the Nilo-Hamites: Bari, Nyangwara, Kuku, Kakwa, Mundari, Lokoya, Lotuho, Toposa, Didinga, Boya and a number of other tribes who have lived east of the River Nile since time immemorial. Such common heritage includes sharing words, expressions and idioms.

The Pojulu people number around 100,000 by official population estimates. Although blended with different accents, due to influence of neighbouring tribes—mainly Kakwa, Nyangwara and Kuku, the Pojulu language is basically one. Believed to have moved westwards from the original habitat east of the River Nile, the Pojulu people share a lot with the Bari people than with any of its other sibling tribes. In addition to words, the two groups also share names such as Lado, Laku, Wani, Pitya, Mori, Kenyi, Yuggu, Poni, Pita, Juan, Kaku and Kiden; although some of the names are spelled differently by the Bari people. The Nyangwara people—a smaller ethnic section of the Bari group of people, who occupy one part of the present day Juba County to the west, follow next in sharing common characteristics with the Pojulu people apart from language. One very common characteristic is music and dance. The Pojulu and Nyangwara people also speak faster than the Bari, Kuku and Kakwa. The Mundari who are largely a combination of pastoralists and sedentary agriculturalists, have peculiar accent that is not easily grasped by the other sisterly tribes.

The Pojulu are a sedentary group of subsistence farmers. Traditionally the Pojulu include hunting and small scale fishing by both women and men during the dry season among their livelihoods activities. Geographically the Pojulu land is part of the so-called Greenbelt Agroecological Zone with part of the land characterized by features of the Iron Stone Plateaux Agroecological Zone to the north. The land is mostly hilly and sloppy with many streams and valleys. Hills, mountains and dense Richer Savannah forest occupy a sizeable land area. The rural Pojulu have subsisted by cultivating tropical summer crops such as sorghum, millet and cassava, as staple and commercial crops in addition to cow peas (black eye peas), yams, pigeon peas, green peas, sesame and hyptus (a genus of rare oil seeds resembling sesame).

This is the first Dictionary to have ever been produced that has dealt with translation of the Pojulu Language into English. As this work went for publishing, no such document had existed in any reference library or archive. The author is therefore privileged to state that this pioneering work has set the pace in putting the Pojulu people and their language on the world map. It will also go a long way in helping generations of the Pojulu people identify with their language and indeed have something for helping them master their language.

Much as any Dictionary has the prime aim of assisting learners, who are not first speakers of a language, this Dictionary is also intended to help the younger generation of Pojulu men and women master what is supposed to be their mother tongue. It is out of question that there are many young people born to Pojulu parents who were born outside their motherland, and have throughout their lives spoken languages common in their places of domicile. This segment of the population needs a dictionary to guide them learn their mother tongue and speak it as are their own parents. On the flip side of the coin, there are native Pojulu speakers who are compelled by circumstances to learn English—the world’s most leading international language—and want to refer to a dictionary to know the meaning of one or more words that they have encountered. This Dictionary will certainly be of use to this group of users.

A section of this Dictionary has been dedicated to some aspects of the language such as word composition and grammar. As this is a maiden version of the publication, the fact that there is room for improvement cannot be discounted. The word list is by no means exhaustive and the author believes more proficient users are bound to discover missing words. These users are encouraged to be kind enough to contact the author and inform on the missed words or advise on some aspects of the language that should be included in the Dictionary to enrich its content. Every such advice will be recorded and acknowledged in subsequent editions of the Dictionary.

Meant to be as concise and as small a reference material as possible, the Dictionary mostly contains quick, short definitions ranging mostly from one word to three lines of text. In many entries, more than one meaning of the word has been given to enable the user take the most appropriate meaning of the word looked up in the Dictionary.

The author maintains a vision of producing online version of this Dictionery replete with word sound effects to enable precise pronunciation of words. This edition does not include word phonetics to guide in pronunciation of words. Therefore, if not sure of how a word is pronounced, the user is advised to ask the nearest proficient Pojulu speaker on how the particular word is pronounced. It is important to repeat the word as many times as possible. Otherwise, it is easy to forget. Alphabets peculiar to the Bari-speaking people and other tribes in the Greater Equatoria Region of South Sudan (i.e., ‘b, ‘d and ‘y—pronounced with some unique sound clicks,) are not easy to new non-native learners. They make the language a bit of user-unfriendly.

Finally, the author hopes that this Dictionary will meet the expectations of its users. It is also hoped that this personal reference material will enhance the user’s learning of the Pojulu language as well as enticing more Pojulu sons and daughters toward learning their mother tongue. As this author has to his credit six languages including his native tongue, he is of solid belief that no language is ‘unlearnable’. In the same vein, no language is as easy as eating biscuits. It takes practice and looking for meanings of new words to master a language faster. Furthermore, much as this dictionary may look like it is only for Pojulu people and those who want to learn their language; it is believed that other speakers of the larger Bari-speaking family, could also use it for reference. Such users should be motivated by the fact that this Dictionary has included more words used in formal communication than in informal communication. It is to be noted that the Pojulu language, just like its sibling the Bari language, has two versions: formal and informal; or official and non-official, if you like. The formal Pojulu language is actually the original Bari, which the first British Missionaries used in translating the Bible to the Bari-speaking groups. For this reason, most of the spellings used in the Dictionary are in the written Bari language. The Bari language, rather than the Pojulu language was the language of instruction in schools and the language used in Christian establishments—mostly the Anglican Church off-shoot: the Episcopal Church of the Sudan. Admittedly, therefore, the Pojulu language is analogous to the American English; although precisely speaking, the Pojulu language has more words than the Bari language.

LB Lokosang

(Author)

Preliminary Notes

Peculiar alphabets

The Pojulu language, an off-shoot of the Bari language, uses additional phonetic alphabets that sound like the heavy pronunciations of the Latin letters B, D, Y, O and combinations of letters: NG, GW and KW. These are:

Masculine and feminine adjectives, nouns and gerunds

The Pojulu language, just like in all Bari group of languages, is distinguished in that all adjectives, nouns and gerunds belong to either gender: masculine and feminine. A masculine noun or gerund is followed by a masculine adjective such as in Laku a ŋiro lo’but (Laku is a good child/boy). A feminine noun or gerund is followed by a feminine adjective such as in Kaku a ŋiro na’but (Kaku is a good child/girl). Note the prefixes lo and na in the adjectives lo’but and na’but, which distinguish between masculine and feminine adjectives respectively.

In the Pojulu language names of things are either masculine (m) or feminine (f). Examples of masculine group of nouns are:

kiko (road); pata (rope); lipo (mud); mere (mountain); ködini (tree); malangi (bottle); döru (grass); kudu (rain); peya’ (lightening/thunder); lo’dek (roof); kibur (aunt hill); jur (area where a people live); gweyari (tribe, race); mu’da (clay pot)

Examples of feminine group of nouns are:

kakat (door); gorom (wall); kat (ground or the Earth); kiti (chair); gwa’da (bed or stool); misa (table); meleseno (farm); lokore (meat); pirit (area or space); ‘balang (salt); yelet (oil).

Names of animals can be either masculine or feminine depending on the gender of the animal. For example a white buffalo (mikor) can be described as mikor lokwe or mikor nakwe, where lo and na designate masculine and feminine respectively.

Names of body parts are either masculine or feminite. Examples of masculine parts are:

koŋe (eye); kume (nose); swöt (ear); lo’biyu (lip); ŋedep (tongue); kele (tooth); kidi (shoulder); lokiliŋ (elbow); könin (hand); morinet (finger); merete (rib); töili (heart); karkuduk (kidney); kuŋu (knee); mokot (leg); mujinet (thigh).

However, some body parts are feminine:

kuwe (head); komoŋ (face); nyekem (chin); murut (neck); kido (chest); ki’diŋ (back of the body torso); pele (the front part of the body torso); mukök or gole (waist); ‘dapanit (front side of the palm or bottom part of the foot), ‘böriköt (skin).

Non-existing nouns and expressions

The Pojulu language does not have meanings for some common English nouns such as:

Car (the Arabic word ‘arabiya’ is used); bullet (the Arabic ‘talaga’ is used but some people would use ‘lowe’ which means ‘arrow’ instead); glass; radio; lock; key; box; suitcase; trousers (or pants in US); shirt; sugar; tea; coffee; school; shop; market; onions; ball; mirror; book; paint; and many others.

These words obviously describe things that did not exist or are not used in or by earlier generations of the Pojulu people. The Arabic, Swahili, Lingala (DR Congo) or even English equivalents are used instead. Example: Arabiya (car); sukar (sugar); gawa (coffee), etc.

Phonetics

Pronunciation of Pojulu words depends on the word syllables. That is, two or more words can have the same spelling but differ in their pronunciation. For example the words ‘miri’ (government) and ‘miri’ (one gifted with talent in expressing himself or herself or one with a special talent) have the same spelling; but differ in pronunciation. The former sounds like the English word ‘silly’ without emphasis on either of the two syllables (‘mi’ and ‘ri’) while the latter sounds like ‘me ray’ with emphasis on the second syllable. Indeed, just like in all languages the better way to learn the exact pronunciation of Pojulu words is to hear how the word is pronounced.

Repetition of the first two letter syllable of a word for a continuous tense

In the Pojulu language, repetition of the first two letters of a word to give a continuous tense of the word stem is common. Examples are:

po-popo (coming); tu-tutu (going); nyesu-nyenyesu (eating); körju-kökörju (getting spoiled or corrupted); puja-pupuja (defying all odds; unyielding); konda-kokondya (doing) and many more.

However, not all words with the same format or that have repeated first two letters have two-letter word prefixes. Examples are:

kukundya (to repair; make neat); kekendya (to talk); pipi’yu (to nurture); tetendya (to repair; to patch up; to maintain); koko’ya (stealing); mimiŋga (to emphasise); mamandu (to plead for e.g. mercy).

Combination of command and indefinite gerunds

Use of two words in combination is common in the Pojulu language. These are the command and the indefinite forms of the same word stem. Together both words give emphasis to a command expression. Examples are: Wuti wutu (go); Poni po (come); rume rum (walk faster); jupuni jupi (dress up); wöki wökön (run); kone ko (bite); lake lak (untie; undo); köle kö (leave it; abandon it; let go). NB: when writing the two words can be connected.

Absence of some Latin alphabets

The Pojulu language, just like all Bari languages lacks certain alphabets or combination of alphabets. The following alphabets are not present in the Pojulu language:

C; F; H; Q; V; X; Z

The following combinations of letters are not found in the Pojulu language:

ch such as in Chair;

gh such as in Ghee;

kh such as in Khaki;

sh such as in She;

th such as in These and Thin;

The Pojulu alphabets are 24 (nineteen English and five others). These are:

A, B, ‘B, D, ‘D, E, G, I, J, K, L, M, N, ŋ, O, ö, P, R, S, T, U, W, Y, ‘Y

Descriptions of words

The following shortened expressions are found throughout the dictionary:

Pojulu-English Dictionery

A

a vi: 1. is or are. Wani a lupudi lo’but (Wani is a good child). Kilo kömu kaŋ a ŋutu ti löti parik (These guests of ours are truly polite). NB: Some writers just add this letter word to the adjective such that instead of a lo’but (is good), it is written alo’but. 2. negative present perfect article, e.g., a kopo (has not come), a ko jowun (has not brought [it]). 3. conjunction used to introduce a new idea but can be a redundant word such as beginning a sentence with ‘and’. A lepeng liya? (where is he?).

Abukaya n: correct spelling is Avukaya—name of a tribe in Yei, Mundri West and Maridi Counties in South Sudan. The Avukaya people are part of the Bantu ethnic tribes.

abur adv: 1. in any way possible; randomly; haphazardly. Kondi abur (Do it in any way you want). 2. unconcerned; not worried. Si’dani abur (Stay at ease; feel at home).

Aburama n: (o. Bible) the name Abraham.

ada adv: Interrogative