IBIMANUKA

DKA

Cow vocabulary is used metaphorically in everyday language, especially in greeting expressions, exclamations, swear words and terms of endearment. Cow metaphors are also found in all components of the Rwandan culture namely concepts, values, customs, symbols, rituals, art, dance, music, sports and social organization. This is the case not only because it is the high ranked cultural icon but also because a symbiotic relationship exists between the cow and the Rwandan society. The study of cow metaphors contributes to the understanding of culture, cognition and the study of the genesis and dynamism of signs.

Introduction

Kinyarwanda cow vocabulary is used very extensively in everyday language to refer to objects, states and events which don't have anything to do with cows. The study of this use of cow vocabulary is important because it shows how metaphors are created, provides insights into the genesis and dynamism of signs and structures, gives credence to the cultural relativity and linguistic determinism and lends support to current theories in linguistics about the important role of metaphors in cognitive processes. New concepts are easily understood when old linguistic expressions which denote referents that exhibit either physical or functional similarity or are associated with them are used. It is thus not surprising to find an abundance of bovine linguistic expressions used metaphorically in Kinyarwanda because, in this 'cow-centric society, the cow is a cultural icon by excellence.

Metaphors

All words which have anything to do with cows such as body parts (horns, eyes, head, paws, legs, etc), physical characteristics (shape and size of horns, colour, age), cow's activities (grazing, drinking, mooing, milking), products (milk, butter), places (kraal, sleeping area, resting area, watering places), how the cow was acquired, etc. act as metaphors. The term metaphor is thus used in this paper more liberally. The correct label should have been trope, any sign used in the secondary plane of expression. Tropes also include metonymies. A generous set of examples are provided below for illustrative purposes.

Idioms

I have shown elsewhere¹ that idioms don't differ from other tropes. The only difference is the structure because idioms consist of two or more linguistic items. Idioms are thus either metaphors, metonymies or de-iconized lexical items. In English for instance, the expression a lame duck (the incumbent being handicapped by the fact the s/he will be leaving office) is a metaphor whereas a smoking gun (incriminating sign) is a metonymy.

amatá (milk)

umuhoora (large cow's trail)

amagaanga (cow's urine)

isháashi (young cow)

ikiráaro (cow's lodging)

icyaárire (grass for cows to sleep on at night)

igicáaniro (kraal)

ibúga (watering place)

isháashi (young cow)

umushuumba (herder)

icyaánsi (milk wooden cup)

inkuungu (hornless cow)

inká (cow)

uruhiimbi (milk stand)

inyána (calf)

injíishi (rope to tie cows)

impfizi (bull)

Generally, the majority of cow metaphors have good connotation. Some of the endearment expressions complementing a woman's beauty are related to cows as the following ones illustrate:

Except in few examples such inká (cow) meaning stupid person and icúkiro (pile of dung) meaning fat and ugly person, introduced by Europeans during the colonial period to put down the Rwandan culture.

Colours

Kinyarwanda doesn't have basic terms for colour. All colour terms are nouns of objects with a particular colour as shown in the following examples:

The majority of colour names come from the colour of the cow's coat. All the following colour terms referred originally to the colour of cows' coat only.

Goats and dogs have their own color names also. Thus umutamu refers to light brown for goats, uruhuúga black over white for both he-goats and dogs.

Greeting expressions

Greeting expressions are either questions asking how the person is or wishes.

The most common are the ones wishing people plenty of cows:

The reply to the preceding greeting expression is:

Exclamations and swear expressions

All exclamations and swear expressions are about cows. Traditionally, Rwandans swore by the name of the king or the person who gave them a cow or somebody very special such as a father or a best friend. Instead of mentioning the name of the person who gave the cow, other indexical information such the cow's name, the type of cow, the place where it was given, the time or the circumstances in which the cow was obtained might be uttered instead as indicated in the following examples.

All these expressions are equivalent to the English counterparts : 'My god'! Jesus Christ'!

Daytime expressions

Rwanda was both an agricultural and pastoral society. Expressions having to do with both agriculture and cattle are used to refer to day time expressions. The cattle expressions are more frequent, however. Here are some examples.

Use of euphemisms

When referring to cows, the king and the drum such as body parts, use, state, activities etc, special linguistic expressions are used and regular ones are avoided (euphemism).

Morphological metaphorical "cowization"

In Kinyarwanda and other Bantu languages, the majority of nouns which refer to human beings belong to class 1 and 2, singular and plural, respectively. In Kinyarwanda, no noun from other semantic categories are found in these two classes. There are many nouns which refer to human beings which are found in 7 and 8, however, where the majority of inanimate objects are found. Here are some examples:

These are humans who are irresponsible, stupid, parasites, physically handicapped or who pose a threat to society belong. This is therefore a metaphoric use of prefix ki- which dehumanizes human beings and demotes them to the inanimate category:

The word inká 'cow' belongs to class 9, with -n- prefix. The majority of words referring to animal words (reptiles, birds) belong here. The majority of cow names are found in this class also:

Most of the praise-words are found in this class:

Whereas the use of the use the prefix -ki- is a metaphoric demotion, the use of -n- is a metaphoric promotion.

Cultural relativity and linguistic determinism

Like in other pastoral societies such as the Fulani of West Africa and the Masai of East Africa or the Nilotic people of Sudan², the cow in Rwanda is highly valued. This is reflected in all aspects of Rwandan life: art, music, poetry, games, oral literature, etc.
There are two types of traditional poetry in Rwanda : court or elite poetry³ and folk poetry. This court poetry which was traditionally performed at the king's palace consisted of three genres: dynastic poetry (ubusízi), panegyric poetry (ibyíivugo) and pastoral poetry (amazína y'íinká) . All these genres of poetry were praise-poetry for the king, national heroes and great warriors, and royal cows, respectively. According to Kagame, pastoral poetry was the highest ranked.
Cows had also call praise-poems (Ibihamagaro by'íinká) which herders recited during the cow parade or when they were called to the watering place.
There are also cow songs (amahaamba, amajurií and amayeengayeengo) which are sung when they are returning home in the evening, or when they are drinking or grazing. They were also sung at parties.
Regular folk songs use cows as themes or motifs, too. The latest audio-tape, Amahoro "Peace"⁴, of Cécile Kayirebwa, the superstar of the Rwandan music, includes Urubamby-ingwe 'what pegs the leopard's skin', a very beautiful melody which praises cow pastures and drinking places. The refrain of this song is amaazi ya nyaanja 'delicious fresh water'. One of the songs of the Rwandan greatest poet and sing-song writer, Cyprien Rugamba, killed in the 1994 Tutsi genocide, is Ijana rya Bisangwa⁵ "the hundred cows of Bisangwa".
In regular poetry, cow metaphors and motifs abound as well. In all genres of Kinyarwanda oral literature (folktales, riddles, children's literature, proverbs), cows are recurrent motifs.
Cow metaphors are used in folk games especially igisoro (African stone game) and children's games. In igisoro, the players try to capture each other's "cows" inká and one can tell that somebody is going to lose when his or her "cows" start becoming 'a line of calves' urunyána . The player usually can start the game from any hole of the igisoro board which has more than one stone inká at least, moving all of them, putting one stone in each hole from the one on the right. If those holes are empty, moving the stones creates urunyána because there will be only one "cow" in each hole which cannot be removed and played in the next moves.
Cow metaphors are seen in folk dance: Women imitate the grace and the elegance of cows and they always raise their arms to imitate the elegant Rwandan cows' long horns. At important events, women dancers wear decorative small light sticks called imihehá 'straws' on their temples and so do cows during cow parade. Women at the royal court wore these decorative objects, also. Male dancers (intoóre) also execute a dance called inká 'cow' and many dances end by dancers 'falling in the cow' kugwa muu nká. Intoóre dancers also had highly valued cow tattoes on the chest in the shape of cow horns to make the dance performance more spectacular.
Many Rwandan names refer to cows⁶ as some of these examples attest: Nkurikiyinka 'I am following cows'; Nshokeyinka 'I am taking cows to a watering place'; Nshunguyinka 'I am coming to the rescue of cows'; Harerinka 'Only cows can raise'; Mutumwinka 'The one who is sent to bring a cow', Rukeribuga 'the one who goes early in the morning to the cow watering' etc.
Like the military, cows also participate in the parade kubyúukuruka at important ceremonies (king touring the country, visit of foreign dignitaries, wedding ceremonies).
The cow social structure mirrored the society social organization. The country was divided into provinces which coincided with the military companies. Most of the province names came from the name of the military company: Nyaruguru, Imvejuru, Bashumba Nyakare, Buhanda-Ndara. Cows living in these respective provinces had also distinct names. As each province had its military leader, cows also had their leader known as Inká y'Indaátwa 'The etite cow'. It is usualy this elite cow that poets composed praise-poems for. Here are some examples below from Kagame⁷:

Cows were treated exactly like warriors, not only in participating in parades but also in having the same type of names as mililatry companies, being objects of inspiration for poets, having praise-poems, praise call-names and so on. Because they were considered as warriors in the pastoral poetry, two moieties had been created for this purpose. Each cow belonged either to the Ibihogo 'light brown' moiety or Amagaaju 'dark brown'. The moieties' names didn't have anything to do with color, however,⁷ but with their respective origin. Indigenous cows of Rwanda belonged to the moeity, Ibihogó whereas those obtained abroad as war spoils, automatically belonged to the Amagaaju. Since in the pastoral poetry, the antagonists are cows, the poet had to make sure that the cow he was composing a poem for didn't have an adversary from the same moiety.
Cows play a very important role in the culture. They are used for bridewealth inkwáano . They are given as rewards for accomplishment, services or a sign of appreciation and friendship. The society depended on every thing from the cow. The skin was used as bed sheet, drum cover, clothing and as a baby-carrier ingobyi. The butter was used for cooking and robbing the body and curing wounds, urine for medicine and washing certain ustensils, wet dung as a glue for baskets, fertilizer and firewood and in construction , while horns were used for pipe straws. Nothing from the cow was wasted. It was to the Rwandans what was the buffalo, the icon of the Plains Indians and the enduring icon of the American West because it, too, provided everything to the Plains Indians. For American Indians the buffalo was only second to Mother Earth.⁸ The Rwandan cow, however, is more than the Plains Indians buffalo. First because it was domesticated. Second because of its symbiotic relationship with the society and what the society does to show its high status in the society fabric. In a nutshell, the Rwandan cow is both a mother and an amazon because the society depended on it for everything, for its gentleness, its grace, its elegance and also for its warrior-like qualities. All these examples clearly support the linguistic and cultural relativity hypothesis.
Not only does the cow vocabulary reflect the Rwandan culture but it also affects it. It shapes the way they look at the world they live in. In this cow-centric society, people see the world around them in terms of cows, by cow standards or in relation and association with the cow. The folk saying" If the hammer is the only tool you have everything starts to look like a nail", seems to be valid in this culture. When Rwandans see a green hill they automatically associate it with being graced by cows grazing it. A quiet valley is seen as a place where cows should be resting. A clear water river makes people feeling thirsty for the cows.

From icon to symbol

Cow linguistic expressions support Peirce's theory of semiotics which classifies signs and structures into three categories namely icons, indices and symbols. Icons occur also in three categories: images, diagrams and metaphors. Images refer to sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. Sound symbolism, onomatopeias and reduplication are good examples of images. Diagrams entail an isomorphism, a one-to-one relationship between the sign and the object. Morphology and syntax are diagrammatic icons. There are three types of indices also namely symptoms, signals and metonymies. Symptoms as the clinical metaphor entails are warning signs, underlying causes.
In language something illustrating this concept would perhaps be something like the question marker je, in Kiswahili, which always occurs in the sentence initial position, to let the hearer know that the speaker is about to ask a question. Signals give spatio-temporal information and actors (speaker/hearer) involved in the speech event. Deictic expressions such now, then, here, there are signals. The majority of signs are symbols. Peirce refers to these as 'amputed signs' because of the opacity in the relationship between the signifier and the signified. This is because the sign has been deiconized or deindexized. Deiconization in the majority of cases is due to phonetic shrinking whereas deindexication is caused by cultural change. The majority of expressions as expressions given earlier show such as color terms, metaphors and many idiomatic expressions entered the language as icons, because of the similarity between the referent expressed by the cow linguistic expression and other referents. Other expressions such as the daytime expressions were indexical (metonymic) because of the association between cow activities and the time of the day. The culture has changed, however. Many people don't have cows anymore, others live in cities or abroad where there are no cows. What is interesting, however, is that even though the culture has changed, the language has remained the same. In the past, people swore and uttered exclamations by using the name of the person from whom they received a cow, the name of the cow, the color of the cow, or the circumstances in which the cow was received. Today the same type of expressions are still being used when clearly no cow or cow donor is involved. The majority of these cow metaphors are "dead metaphors". Others have thus been deiconized, becoming opaque thus reaching the symbolic level as predicted in Peirce's semiotics.
The fact that Kinyarwanda uses a lot of cow metaphors is not surprising since the cow is indeed a cultural icon. Metaphors are drawn from linguistic expressions which relate to basic human experiences. Some of these metaphors are universal: concretization, anthropocentrism, space. Others are cultural specific such as cultural icons which might come from local fauna, flora or artifacts. The American car for instance has contributed a lot of metaphors and idioms to the English language such as to be in the fast lane, to be in the driver's seat, to be in the back seat, to put a pedal to the metal, a bumpy road ahead, easy ride, to get a free ride, etc. with the latest expression the information superhighway referring to the internet and the world wide web.⁹ This is, because the car plays a very important role also in the American society.

Cow metaphors and cognitive linguistics

The use of cow metaphors in Kinyarwanda also lends support to the work being done in cognitive linguistics¹⁰. These metaphors are not just tropes but conceptual metaphors as well. Live and dead metaphors entail a similarity (physical or functional) with the referent in the primary plane of expression. Conceptual metaphors, on the other hand, are used to help speakers understand new concepts such as space locations words to express states, movement expressions to express activities, destinations vocabulary to refer to purposes or journey metaphor to refer to life ¹⁰,¹¹. The contribution of cognitive linguistics, the study of the unconscious mind, has been the discovery of the "metaphorical thought" and "unconscious metaphors"¹⁰ used in everyday language. Some of the metaphors are known by native speakers to be metaphors but many are unconscious and don't have any similarity whatsoever with cows. It is thus not surprising that cow vocabulary be in the category of these primary conceptual metaphors in Kinyarwanda knowing the role cows play in the Rwandan culture. Some of these conceptual cow metaphors are the warrior is a cow, the woman is a cow and the dancer is a cow. That a warrior is a cow metaphor was shown in section IX where it is indicated that cows and warriors have the same praise-names: such as ingaángaare 'strong one, imbaanzamihigo 'the one who starts challenges', indáshyikíirwa 'unreachable', intágaanzwá 'invincible', inkootanyi 'great warrior', inyamámare 'famous'. The same words used to refer to cows are used to refer to warriors also. A great warrior is called impfíizi 'bull'. A handisome warrior is séebihogo 'brown cow'.The warrior's activities are also referred to by using cow vocabulary as well. When he goes to the war front he is 'going to the cow watering well' gushooka. He goes there 'with cows's speed and energy' isibo. His weapons (bows, spears, swords) 'graze' kuríisha when they are used to kill the enemy. When he is using his spears to fight the enemy, he is 'watering them at the cow drinking well' kwuuhira amacúmu. When he recites his praise-poem, he 'bellows like a bull' kwíivuga and his praise-poem 'mooes for the calf' kuvumeera, that is resonates harmoniously and rhythmically. The study of cow metaphors show how culture and the environment affect people's perception and view of the world they live in and that thought cannot exist independently of human experience. All these findings go along with Peirce's theory of the genesis and dynamism of signs and structures and the claims of cognitive linguistics about the role of the body and environment in the creation and comprehension of metaphors.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to two anonymous reviewers of Anthropologidal Linguistics for their comments and suggestions.

References