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kipilefti. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word
kipilefti, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say
kipilefti in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word
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Swahili
Etymology
Borrowed from English keep left, from the keep left sign that appeared at the entrance.[1][2][3]
Noun
kipilefti (ki-vi class, plural vipilefti)
- roundabout
- Synonym: mzunguko
References
- ^ Rory Sutherland (2014 January 4) “Why don’t Americans have kettles?”, in The Spectator: “Some clearly exist in Africa, since the Swahili for roundabout is kipi-lefti from the ‘Keep Left’ sign that appeared at the entrance.”
- ^ Welmers, William Everett (1973) African Language Structures, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, →ISBN, page 160:
In Swahili, the English instruction on a road sign has been adopted to refer to a traffic circle or roundabout; the Swahili form is /kipilefti/. By analogy with a great many nouns in which /ki-/ is a singular prefix and which have plural forms with a prefix /vi-/, the first syllable of this noun is re-analyzed as a prefix, and more than one traffic circle is, of course, /vipilefti/.
- ^ Petzell, Malin (2005) “Expanding the Swahili vocabulary”, in Africa & Asia, volume 5, →ISSN, archived from the original on 2009-11-29, page 90 of 85-107: “A borderline case is kip(i)lefti ‘roundabout’ which comes from the English ‘keep left’. Although this cannot be said to be a pure creation, it is an illustration of innovative usage of English inasmuch as it is the definition of a concept that is used instead of its name.”