thiirĩ

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Kikuyu[edit]

Alternative forms[edit]

Etymology[edit]

Cf. Maasai e-sile (debt).[1]

Hinde (1904) records thiire as an equivalent of English debt in “Jogowini dialect” of Kikuyu.[2]

Pronunciation[edit]

As for Tonal Class, Armstrong (1940) classifies this term into moondo class which includes mũndũ, huko, igego, igoti, inooro, irigũ, 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)

Noun[edit]

thiirĩ class 14 (plural mathiirĩ)[1]

  1. debt
    thiirĩ ũcio - the debt
    kũrĩha thiirĩ - to pay off debt

Derived terms[edit]

(Proverbs)

References[edit]

  1. 1.0 1.1 “thiirĩ” in Benson, T.G. (1964). Kikuyu-English dictionary, p. 509. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  2. ^ Hinde, Hildegarde (1904). Vocabularies of the Kamba and Kikuyu languages of East Africa, pp. 18–19. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  3. ^ Armstrong, Lilias E. (1940). The Phonetic and Tonal Structure of Kikuyu. Rep. 1967. (Also in 2018 by Routledge).
  4. ^ 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.