The socio-cultural and linguistic implications of Zulu names
Names and naming practices reflect the socio-cultural background of any particular society. Names are terms that can refer to any concept or object and naming practices concern the ‘how’ of naming. This article looks into the socio-cultural and linguistic implications of isiZulu names amongst the Zulu people. Socio-cultural implications are the large scale forces within cultures and societies that affect the thoughts and behaviours of individuals in naming practices. These factors are mainly influenced by ethnic values, identity, and family and kinship structures of that particular individual. In this regard, the concept of a name will be interrogated to showcase complexity of meanings in the African context. It will explain and define the term ‘onomastics’ as the science of naming in relation to the African society and naming practices. The article also defines the concept ‘implication’, and examines the cultural and linguistic (inter alia morphological) formations in naming practices and their significance in naming. The arguments about Zulu naming practices which the article raises emanate from a study carried out on naming practices in KwaZulu-Natal in 2000. The significance of the year 2000 is that it was the beginning of the 21st century and hence a strategic time in history to investigate changes in naming practices.
Implicative Denotations of Cigogo Personal Names
This study takes an onoma-pragmatic approach to investigating Cigogo personal names, in order to identify the determinants of the choices and the implications involved in naming. Personal names are considered here to be utterances like any other, whose understanding depends heavily upon their situational interpretation, based on both general and specific information shared by speakers and surrounding the utterance. Therefore the data in this study were analysed with general background information to retrieve the relevant etymologies, and with specific information to identify their possible implicatures. The findings have shown that Gogo personal names derive etymologically from lineage, seasons, socio-economic activities, calamities, surroundings, birth circumstances and celebrities. All these collectively carry two implicatures: either recording and recalling, or wishes and prayers. The sources of personal names reveal not only how this community reckoned time before the introduction of literacy, but also how they have worshiped. Of further interest is the recording of birthdays, family history and clan legacy by Cigogo speakers through personal names. Some of the names – particularly the ancestral ones – were used as good will prayers and wishes bestowed upon the younger generation. These observations may inspire further study of personal naming, a subject area of pragmatics which so far has not received sufficient systematic attention. Further, the pragmatics of African personal names illuminates one dimension in the complex transmission of cultural and historical information in oral knowledge traditions. Keywords : Cigogo, onomastics, onoma-pragmatic, personal names, naming systems, Tanzania
The analysis of nonlinear systems in the frequency domain using Nonlinear Output Frequency Response Functions
Abstract The Nonlinear Output Frequency Response Functions (NOFRFs) are a concept which provides a new extension of the well-known concept of the Frequency Response Function (FRF) of linear systems to the nonlinear case. The present study introduces a NOFRFs based approach for the analysis of nonlinear systems in the frequency domain. It is well known that a nonlinear system can, under rather general conditions, be represented by a polynomial type Nonlinear Auto Regressive with eXogenous input (NARX) model. From the NARX model of a nonlinear system under study, the NOFRFs based approach for the frequency analysis of nonlinear systems involves solving a set of linear difference equations known as the Associated Linear Equations (ALEs) to determine the system nonlinear output responses and then the NOFRFs of the system up to an arbitrary order of nonlinearity of interests. The results enable a representation of the frequency domain characteristics of nonlinear systems by means of a series of Bode diagram like plots that can be used for nonlinear system frequency analyses for various purposes including, for example, condition monitoring, fault diagnosis, and nonlinear modal analysis.