Talk:Kongo people

Etymology

Online Etymology Dictionary gives Congo as coming from the river, whose name derives from "mountains." Any cite at all on "hunters?" — LlywelynII 16:10, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

The river is named from the country, not the other way around. In Kikongo, as far as I know it, the word for mountain is "mongo" and in fact Mbanza Kongo sits on a flat topped mountain (very impressive if you approach it by road, it really looms in front of you as you approach, and Mbanza Kongo is now a big city). In Kikongo the river is called Nzadi (which actually means a large river that flows into the ocean, not necessarily any river. The river name is first reported in 1506 by Duarte Pacheco Pereira, Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis.

In any Kikongo dictionary, for example Bentley's dictionary, you will see that the term "nkongo" means hunter. The "n" element is a shortening of "mu" the class 1 prefix meaning a person (class 1 was mu in the sixteenth century, but drifted into a nasal in the mid to late seventeenth century, for example the dictionary of 1648 often reports two spellings for many class 1 nouns, a mu spelling and an n spelling. Sometimes the word is thus written with an apostrophe as in n'kongo to indicate the "lost" letter.

I don't know how early this eytmology is reported, certainly Bentley reports it in Pioneering in the Congo, I don't think I've ever seen it in an earlier source, but I might be wrong on that score.

I'm not sure I buy it, though as mentioned above it is attested in literature written by Europeans on the term. However, I think the Europeans ultimately got it form Kongolese speakers. It's quite common for people speaking these languages to engage in etymologies of ancient terms, for example speculating on words in other noun classes or verbs that have specific meanings and transfering them to those in other noun classes.

I hope this helps to clear things up. Beepsie (talk) 22:00, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

I think the French & Belgian colonies might still've been named for the river ("the Congo"), but cool. Thanks. — LlywelynII 04:59, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

Grammar

Not being a linguist, I am nevertheless trying to use the names of the ethno-linguistic groups correctly. Example: oviMbundu = plural, ociMbundu = singular, uMbundu = adjective and language. This is why I was surprised when, in the text, I found "Bakongo" used as if it was an adjective. Is baKongo not one of the plural forms, corresponding to the singular muKongo? And is the adjective not kongo or kiKongo? -- Aflis (talk) 15:31, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

This is a hard question and one that legitimately is difficult. Whose grammar should we use, Kikongo grammar or English grammar? In English, following a tradition that goes back at least a century, the personal form of Kongo is Kongolese, or Congolese, and the Mukongo/Bakongo function has to follow its own grammatical rules. However, there seems to be a tradition of calling the people Bakongo, a tradition which dates back to the early 20th century, but probably not earlier. All our early texts that relate to the kingdom call its people "moxicongo" plural "moxicongos." This is true of Bakongo authors writing in Portuguese as much as Europeans. Moxicongo, in turn breaks down to mu-(class one marker for people) nxi (Sansolo dialect, meaning country) and Kongo (meaning the name of the place. Thus this ethnonym actually meant "citizen of Kongo" and not everyone speaking a language we now call Kikongo. People in Loango, for example did not call themselves Bakongo even though their language is intelligible to someone from the kingdom of Kongo, instead, they called themselves Bavili (in Portuguese orthography, mobili, plural mobilis), and people for Ngoyo were Woyo, etc.

Now as for adjectival forms, they should agree with the class of the nouns they modify, which is a feature that is just not found in English and can't be reproduced in that langauge. Mambu ma Kongo, things relating to Kongo, Fu kia Kongo, the custom of Kongo, and so on. We could decide that all English nouns have a class, for example class 1 with class 2 plurals, and use Mukongo/Bakongo adjectives, as in "Bakongo customs". Or we could just treat the word Kongo as an invariable noun, same singular and plural, same form as an adjective, etc. Kongo customs, Kongo matters. Or we could say Kongolese customs, Kongolese matters. In fact you can find any one of these in usage in English language texts.

Sorry to be so long winded, and I hope what I've written here makes sense. Beepsie (talk) 17:31, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for having taken the time for a differentiated explanation - which is exactly what I had hoped for! The gist of it is, of course, that every author has to make an enlightened decision concerning the use he/she will follow in English. I think I shall stick to baKongo and muKongo as nouns, use Kongo for an adjective, and kiKongo for the language - that is, when speaking of the 20th/21st century. Not overly sophisticated, I guess, but I hope you will let it pass. -- Aflis (talk) 22:19, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

The spelling Congolese is in general, and should probably be exclusively, used for the countries (Congo-Brazzaville and Congo-Kinshasa). The words muKongo and baKongo are usually spelled with English rules as well: Mukongo and Bakongo. The spelling rules of most Kikongo (or Kongo) works don't capitalize the K either. This rule of capitalizing the letter of the root is not used everywhere nor in every Bantu language, one should not assume it does. --Mᴏʏᴏɢᴏ/ ⁽ᵗᵃˡᵏ⁾ 15:28, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for clarifying these points! -- Aflis (talk) 17:42, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

Proposal for the deletion of all the galleries of personalities from the articles about ethnic groups

Seemingly there is a significant number of commentators which support the general removal of infobox collages. I think there is a great opportunity to get a general agreement on this matter. It is clear that it has to be a broad consensus, which must involve as many editors as possible, otherwise there is a big risk for this decision to be challenged in the near future. I opened a Request for comment process, hoping that more people will adhere to this proposal. Please comment here. Hahun (talk) 10:42, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

The 5.69 million

I'm not sure if it would even be possible to nail something like this down, but it seems we talk about all of the people shipped from the Kongo during the trans-atlantic slave trade, but what I'm wondering is if there is any estimate of how many of these 5.69 million were Kongo peoples? What makes this hard is that though the Portuguese seem to group them all into one Kingdom, that it was more a federation than anything, so I imagine a lot of slaves held by one Kongo state could have include Kongo people from other Kongo states. I'm not sure how the Kongo and Portuguese might have viewed these captives, and if they would have been viewed differently. I can see the Kongo states viewing them as foreigners or at least not "themselves" and passing that view along to the Portuguese that they were holding captive "others" when in fact they were probably neighboring Kongo peoples. Do any of the sources in this article address this so that this could be made more clear? Do DNA studies show a lot of Kongo admixture in the descendent of slaves in the Americas to gauge how many of them were Kongo and how many of them were "others Central Africans"? --Criticalthinker (talk) 19:29, 12 March 2018 (UTC)

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