by তন্ময় ভট্টাচার্য্য (guest)
2/22/2014, 1:25 PM
Got a bit suspicious of nzere meaning "river that swallows all rivers", looked too precise a meaning for a short word. Turns out nzadi means "a great river" in Kongo (the language group, belonging to the Bantu family, is properly KiKongo, and the people, whose ethnonym comes from a word meaning hunter from a root for collecting food, are the BaKongo, but in English, one often ignores such grammatical niceties, and just says Kongo) according to an online dictionary (which does not include the word nzere) and it is applied to what we call the Congo river (from the same ethnonym). Many places say nzai is a dialectical form of nzadi, but I can't quite find nzere, or the meaning of swallowing all rivers in any resource on the language proper. Typically people say "nzadi or nzere means river that swallows all rivers" or "nzere means river that swallows all rivers", or "nzere means river", but can't find any thing more than that (where is the swallow bit, and where is the river bit?).