I'm reading the Nyotekundu Sourcebook PDF from my 2300AD CD-ROM this evening, and noticed that most of the Azanian placenames are said to be from Swahili or Bantu. That didn't sound quite right to me, so I checked online and sure enough, neither of those is among the 11 national languages of South Africa. Maybe too late to change now, but still... maybe a bit of revisionist history is in order, so that Azania includes more than just South Africa?
Hmm, I googled Swahili and found that it is a sublanguage of the Bantu language group, primarily spoken quite a ways further north than South Africa. Swahili is currently an official language in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and the Congo. Perhaps instead of the story of Nyotekundu being named by the Azanians, the actual naming was done by French spacers from the Congo? (Isn't the Congo part of French Africa circa 2300?)
Googling Bantu says that it is a language group of which Swahili has the broadest current usage; but then the usage map includes almost all of Africa, so perhaps there is some language of the Bantu group among those spoken in Azania (although probably not Swahili). Ah, yes, going to the Southern Bantu languages I see Xhosa and Zulu among them, which are two of the official languages of South Africa.
So it seems that maybe I have just wasted some time researching all of this, except that we still have the mystery of the system name itself which is said to come from Swahili, which seems a bit odd for the Azanians to use for the first system which they had the privilege of naming. But there are already references to Nyotekundu all through 2300AD materials, so certainly too late to rename it.
Hmm, I googled Swahili and found that it is a sublanguage of the Bantu language group, primarily spoken quite a ways further north than South Africa. Swahili is currently an official language in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and the Congo. Perhaps instead of the story of Nyotekundu being named by the Azanians, the actual naming was done by French spacers from the Congo? (Isn't the Congo part of French Africa circa 2300?)
Googling Bantu says that it is a language group of which Swahili has the broadest current usage; but then the usage map includes almost all of Africa, so perhaps there is some language of the Bantu group among those spoken in Azania (although probably not Swahili). Ah, yes, going to the Southern Bantu languages I see Xhosa and Zulu among them, which are two of the official languages of South Africa.
So it seems that maybe I have just wasted some time researching all of this, except that we still have the mystery of the system name itself which is said to come from Swahili, which seems a bit odd for the Azanians to use for the first system which they had the privilege of naming. But there are already references to Nyotekundu all through 2300AD materials, so certainly too late to rename it.
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