Word for the Travel Wise (02/19/06)

Since it is Sunday, I decided to relax a little on today’s feature by teaching a word we may never use in our entire lives. A word that requires no further online study unless you choose to do so, but for now you can file it under useless trivia.

Today’s word is a Tshiluba word used in the Democratic Republic of the Congo:

manimani – orange

Tshiluba is a Narrow Bantu also known as Luba-Kasai and Luba-Lulua. It is an official lang of the DRC in addition to French. Approximately 6,300,000 people speak the lingo and additional web resources are scarce. Feel free to leave a comment with any extra resources that could help others learn a bit more than what I’ve noted. Orange happens to rank high on my list of favorite colors so when it came down to picking time I decided on this one. You can continue learning the words for your own favorite colors by taking this English-Tshiluba quiz online. Chances are you’ll get all of them wrong, unless you’re an extremely talented guesser. After enough trial and error you’ll eventually be able to ramble off all the colors of the rainbow and have no one to tell them to, except in the Congo.