Talk:kivili-chimpenze

Apparently, this is just a widely reported error? "Tshiluba kivili &mdash; chimpenze" somehow was misread as "Tshiluba: kivili-chimpenze", I.e. "kivili" identifies the language or dialect, and "chimpenze" is the actual word in question. This was perpetuated because everybody copy-pasted "the etymology of chimpanzee" without bothering to check. It seems to appear in print now, but just after 2008 or so, which means that the term was made up on Wikipedia via "citogenesis". --Dbachmann (talk) 14:51, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

The best online resource on Tshiluba I could find is http://www.ciyem.ugent.be/ This gives a translation of nkìma (ncìma) for "monkey/ape", and the following three terms for "chimpanzee": mùkumbusù, mwakaja, nsokomuntu . Ostensibly, none of the these bears even a passing resemblance to the supposed Tshiluba word *chimpenze.

An anonymous editor left the note "ki-Vii: ki = "language of" Vili = the Vili people, part of the population of Kasaï. kiVili is a Tshiluba dialect." Now, the Vili or Bavili seem to be the historical population of the w:Kingdom of Loango, so perhaps we are looking at a garbled suggestion that the 18th-century word "chimpanze" might have been of Vili origin. But Civili appears to survive as a minor language of Congo, reported with a few thousand speakers. It is not "a Tshiluba dialect" as claimed by the anon. It will be almost hopeless to try verify the existence of a word chimpenze in this language in print. --Dbachmann (talk) 17:58, 13 March 2015 (UTC)