A Hausa-English Dictionary (review)

This Hausa-English dictionary by Paul Newman is designed to match Roxana Ma Newman’s English-Hausa dictionary (1990), and the two volumes form an essential tool for English speakers interested in Hausa and vice versa. Translators in particular, who relied for years on the English-Hausa dictionary, will welcome the new dictionary, which is compact, yet a treasury of words necessary to comprehend all facets of Hausa life and culture.

The dictionary has three main parts. The user’s guide, besides indicating the conventions followed, gives a succinct but precise account of the twelve parts of speech Newman distinguishes for Hausa. The three appendices at the end of the volume present the pronouns and the tense-aspect paradigms, the illustration of some selected noun-based or verb-based derivational word forms, and the days of the week and the months of the year. (Newman marks vowel length by a macron. In this review, length is represented by the typographically more convenient device of doubling the vowels.)

The dictionary overall has a rather pleasant and readable layout (the only typesetting error I noticed in the entire book is an incorrect font size in the entry TATTAAS-[p. 200]). The dictionary, according to the back cover, gathers more than ten thousand words and even includes dialectal forms (which are marked as such). The dictionary lists all essential Hausa words one may encounter in public life and the media (e.g., tà zar̃cèe ‘prolongation of office term’ [p. 231], a political concept that surfaced during the precampaign for the 2007 presidential elections in Nigeria). There is also a remarkable effort to gather technical vocabulary (kèebàbbun kalmoomii), in particular for the language sciences and literature (including, e.g., words for ‘fricative’, ‘alveolar consonant’, ‘digraph’, ‘hooked letter’, ‘reduplication’, ‘liquid consonant’, ‘phonetics’, ‘morphology’, ‘causative’, ‘dative case’, ‘poem meter’, ‘conjunction’, etc.)

Newman also supplies detailed definitions and finds space in his entries to illustrate all important submeanings. A Google search indicated that the dictionary also contains about 110 idioms and proverbs, some of which even have a literal translation to help the reader understand the basic metaphor (I have counted about twenty such literal translations). One only wishes that the idioms receiving literal translations had been better chosen. For example, the metaphor behind à-ji-gar̃au ‘stimulant, amphetamine’ (p. 3) cannot be recovered since gar̃au (an ideophone) is not listed (the expression literally means ‘one feels extremely well’). Similarly, kuunàr̃ bakin waakee ‘suicide attack’ (p. 132) remains opaque even if the reader looks up all of the words (it is a historical expression that refers to the story of a man who threw himself into a fire pit while carrying a hated dictator on his back). The same can be said about the expression shìgaa-shar̃ò-bâa-shaanuu ‘meddlesomeness’ (p. 186), which literally means ‘entering sharo without cattle’ and refers to the sharo ritual that is practiced only by herdsmen who own cattle. The motivation of the expression duuniyàr̃-gizò ‘Internet’ (lit., ‘world of spider’) derives from Hausa folklore, in which anything associated with Spider, a frequent character in folktales, is fake or virtual (see also bàkan gizò ‘rainbow’, lit., ‘bow of spider’). One also finds only one etymology given in the entire dictionary (r̃askwanà ‘calculator’ is linked to English ready reckoner [p. 167]). All other apparent loanwords have only their meaning indicated. This is the case for the following words having English sources: gàr̃màhôo ‘record player’ (< gramophone), goosùlôo ‘traffic jam’ (< go slow), and ìnkiyàa ‘temporary address’ (< in care of ).

The back cover claims that the dictionary will serve language learners and practical users, who, according to the introduction, must have “a grasp of the fundamentals of Hausa grammar” (p. ix). Linguists consulting the dictionary, however, will quickly detect that the dictionary has benefitted from the findings of the Newmans’ research. For example, one is surprised by the number of entries identified as adjectives, since Hausa is widely...