irigũ

Kikuyu

Etymology

Hinde (1904) records marigu as an equivalent of English banana in “Jogowini dialect” of Kikuyu, listing also Kamba maīyu as its equivalent.^[1]

Pronunciation

IPA^(key): /ìɾìɣòꜜ/^[2]

As for Tonal Class, Armstrong (1940) classifies this term into moondo class which includes mũndũ, huko, igego, igoti, inooro, irũa, kĩbaata, kĩmũrĩ, kũgũrũ, mũciĩ, mũgeni, mũri, mwaki (“fire”), ndaka, ndigiri, njagathi, njogu, Mũrĩmi (“man's name”), etc.^[3] Benson (1964) classifies this term into Class 1 with a disyllabic stem, together with ndaka, and so on.

(Kiambu)

(Limuru) As for Tonal Class, Yukawa (1981) classifies this term into a group including cindano, huko, iburi, igego, igoti, ini (pl. mani), inooro, irũa, iturubarĩ (pl. maturubarĩ), kĩbaata, kĩmũrĩ, kũgũrũ, mũciĩ, mũgeni, mũgũrũki, mũmbirarũ, mũndũ, mũri, mũthuuri, mwaki (“fire”), mwario (“way of speaking”), mbogoro, nda, ndaka, ndigiri, ngo, njagathi, njogu, nyondo (“breast(s)”), and so on.^[4]

Noun

irigũ class 5 (plural marigũ)

banana

Derived terms

(Proverbs)

References

^ Hinde, Hildegarde (1904). Vocabularies of the Kamba and Kikuyu languages of East Africa, pp. 4–5. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
^ Clements, George N. and Kevin C. Ford (1979). "Kikuyu Tone Shift and Its Synchronic Consequences", p. 188. In Linguistic Inquiry, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 179–210.
^ Armstrong, Lilias E. (1940). The Phonetic and Tonal Structure of Kikuyu. Rep. 1967. (Also in 2018 by Routledge).
^ Yukawa, Yasutoshi (1981). "A Tentative Tonal Analysis of Kikuyu Nouns: A Study of Limuru Dialect." In Journal of Asian and African Studies, No. 22, 75–123.

“irigũ” in Benson, T.G. (1964). Kikuyu-English dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press.