The word “proverb” from Latin “pro-verbium” (“pro” meaning “in front of” and “verbium” meaning “word”), suggests that a proverb takes the place of ordinary words. Proverbs have had a great influence on the lifestyles of many people, mainly through means of religion and culture. They are very common and employed in African societies, particularly in Hausa, a language very rich in this field. In this paper 28 Hausa proverbs, related to 14 human body parts, are quoted and some metaphorical usages of them, found in works listed in References, are given.
The presence of Arabic loans in Swahili has not become subject of reliable corpus-based analyses so far. The influence of Arabic language on Swahili can be investigated in literary sources, but reference to whether writers are Muslims or not is essential for their differentiation. This article intends to investigate the presence of Arabic in contemporary prose texts written by Tanzanian authors from Zanzibar and from mainland. The electronic corpus has two sets, Tanzanian corpus and Zanzibarian corpus respectively which are almost equal in size. The reference list of Arabic loans has been extracted from two published sources. Using Concordance, a concordance software for text analysis, the frequency of words representing grammatical classes is tested. Differences in the two corpora have been indicated, as well as some shared occurrences of items of Arabic origin (mostly adverbs and conjunctions).
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