Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Khoekhoen: spelling, vorme, betkenis

1990; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 49; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00020189008707726

1469-2872

Gabriël Stefanus Nienaber,

Multilingual Education and Policy

SUMMARY Over three centuries ‘Hottentot’ was the ethnonym for the yellow‐skinned people of Southern Africa. In the course of time it acquired connotatively derogatory meanings and became a term of abuse. ‘Khoekhoen’, the people's own national name, was substituted for ‘Hottentot’. The substitution was generally welcomed, but not its spelling and form. The spelling was according to the standard orthography, as officially introduced in 1977. The traditionalists preferred the short ‘Khoi’, or, if it must be, the symmetrical ‘Khoikhoi’ to ‘Khoekhoen’. In addition to the spelling with ‐oi‐, they chose a form depleted of gender, number and case. In this there is one misunderstanding. It has been established that the diphthong ‐oi‐ is not heard in the best Nama pronunciation of the name and it was replaced by the diphthong ‐oe‐ in the standard orthography. The ‐o‐ in ‐oe‐ approaches the ‐o‐ in ’short’ and the ‐e‐ the ‐a‐ in ‘share’, in IPA [ ] and [e ]. Concerning the form, the native speakers do not normally use the national name monosyllabically. In their speech the normal form is reduplicative. Their name for themselves is ‘Khoekhoen’. Standard Nama does indeed know a word khoekhoe, but then only as adverb, meaning to ‘speak Nama’, and not as a noun. If it is to be used as a noun, common or proper, it must accord with the usual grammatical rules, as ‘Khoekhoen’ does, and as ‘Khoekhoe’ does not The ending ‐n in Khoekhoen marks the plural number of the common gender, as the ‐n does in the anthropologically linked Saa‐n (Bushmen). Those who choose to write Khoekhoe should for the same reason write ‘Saa’ and ‘Khoesaa’. Morphologically, ‘Khoekhoen’ is composed of two components: the initial Khoe‐ allies itself with the whole compound in the relationship of the subject of the entity. At the same time it enters into a relationship with the final component of a partitive genitive. ‘Khoekhoen’ means: the subject Khoe‐ is one man/person of many men/people, as expressed by the common gender in the plural, namely by the marker ‐n. Paraphrased in general terms ‘Khoekhoen’ as an ethnonym signifies a person who says he is one of his own group/nation/ community, and negatively, he is not one of the Damaras (the ‘slaves’ of the Naman) or Saan (socially and economically despised by the Naman) or any other non‐national group. If ‘Hottentot’ is supplanted by well‐meaning people by an ethnonym derived from the national name of the people concerned, the name ought not to be mutilated. In English texts the ethnonym Khoekhoen should be dealt with in the same way as the comparable indigenous names Griqua (a Griqua, the Griquas) and Korana (a Korana, the Koranas). Likewise one should write a Khoekhoen, the Khoekhoens.