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Mzinga no um singa in America

A client recently brought this name to my attention. “Why on earth would a company change its name from Prospero to Mzinga?” he asked. Well they don’t say anywhere on their website corporate information, so we can only assume something was broken or not working with Prospero. After all, there are no other reasons to change your name, especially when the company is doing well. [Ed. it has now been brought to my attention that Mzinga acquired Prospero]

But more interesting for me (being a namiac) was the choice of a Zulu word. Sure, finding domains is tough, but stretching to the Zulu language is not the norm. In fact, common and popular words in Zulu are all taken already as .com domain names too!

Mzinga, pronounced Um Zinga  (soft um), is the word for The Ring. But if you want to look this up in a Zulu dictionary, you have to enter zinga or  ~zinga. In English (and most Western languages) we modify words with particles at the end, like in  ringer, ringing, ringed, etc. or we use a pronoun like The or A in front. In Zulu, the modifier goes in front. You will see this too in other eastern African languages.

Did you know you can track African tribal migration by the commonalities in their languages? Tribes who migrated thousands of years ago share language similarities with the Zulu language. Of course, Zululand is part of South Africa, and they could migrate no further South without getting on a boat.

On the south west coast of South Africa, Xhosa is the dominant language, and it has almost nothing in common with Zulu, as it evolved from migration down the west coast. Now you might understand why South Africa has 6 official languages….four from  from tribal history (though there are more in usage), Afrikaans from the Dutch Settlers, and English from the English colonizers. They all come together at the bottom of the continent, in a country that has such a common name you have to use the term Southern Africa for the region and not the country name. A great melting pot. A country with a great tagline from that wise, wise man Dr Nelson Mandela: The Rainbow Nation.

PS In Zulu you will hear Hamba Gahle when people leave. No it does not mean Goodbye. It translates almost exactly into the common American farewell phrase: Take it Easy (literally Go Carefully).

PPS As you can see from the comment, Mzinga is used in Swahili for beehive …yes Eastern African language roots – beehives are round in nature after all. But Swahili is not a language per say. Like Fanagalo in South Africa, it is the common overlap of many languages used in the region. Purists might say a bastardization of all of them.

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