Published by De Gruyter Mouton March 15, 2022
Newman, Paul & Roxana Ma Newman: Hausa Dictionary: Hausa-English English-Hausa, Ƙamusun Hausa: Hausa-Ingilishi/Ingilishi-Hausa
William R. Leben
From the journal Journal of African Languages and Linguistics
https://doi.org/10.1515/jall-2021-2023
Hausa speakers, language learners, and scholars have a new reason to rejoice with the publication of a new full-sized Hausa-English and English-Hausa dictionary by Paul Newman and Roxana Ma Newman by Bayero University Press in Kano, Nigeria. The front matter—in both English and Hausa, apart from the Abbreviations & Symbols pages exclusively in English—explains that the new work addresses a problem that has existed for a long time. Despite a highly distinguished lexicographical tradition (Newman and Newman 2001), including among several others an authoritative English-Hausa dictionary by Roxana Ma Newman (Newman 1990) (Yale University Press) and a similarly fine Hausa-English companion dictionary by Paul Newman (Newman 2007) (Yale University Press), access has been limited for the many millions of prospective users in Nigeria and in Africa in general.
Hausa dictionary users are a lucky group, having had a choice of excellent resources for a long time, including the large and quite reliable volumes by Bargery (1934) and Abraham (1949) along with many smaller ones. Also worth mentioning is Robinson’s (1899) large-scale Hausa dictionary, which was the reference of choice in the earlier part of the twentieth century and has seen four editions, the latest one reprinted in 2018 in paperback form. A bigger milestone reached in 2006 is the 15,754-entry (Ƙamusun Hausa na Jami’ar Bayero 2006) Ƙamusun Hausa, a Hausa-Hausa dictionary from the Centre for the Study of Nigerian Languages (now the Centre for Research, Translation and Folklore) at Bayero University Kano. For a 2001 list of Hausa dictionaries large and small, see the bibliography in Newman and Newman (2001). For a fuller survey of scholarship on Hausa language going back to 1843, see Newman (1991).
The work under review here combines and updates the contents of Roxanna Ma Newman’s earlier English-Hausa Dictionary and Paul Newman’s earlier Hausa-English dictionary. For the new edition, the earlier authors worked with a panel of native Hausa-speaking linguists who contributed new entries, new meanings for existing entries, and corrections to the previous editions. The look of the new volume is similar in many respects to the earlier separate volumes. The major difference is that the new volume is a large paperback published in Nigeria by Bayero University Press, potentially making the volume much more widely available in Nigeria and the rest of Africa than the earlier Yale volumes.
Some dialectal variants are retained in the new volume, while others are lost. The dialectal form lḕmon Kanṑ ‘orange’ is carried over to the new volume, as is jàkā ‘1,000 CFA.’ But missing from the new volume is the Niger Hausa word jandar̃mà ‘police officer.’ Some entries add a new phrase, such as jàkar shāyī ‘teabag,’ or a new set of meanings, such as English next, to which is added the prepositional expressions dab dà and kusa dà. This particular entry is shortened slightly by omitting a few examples from the previous edition of how next is rendered in context.
The most surprising and questionable change from the Yale volumes is the decision to mark tone and vowel length only to differentiate words in which they are contrastive. So for example, the entries for the two Hausa expressions meaning ‘for sure’ and ‘henna’ appear respectively as lalle [lállé:] and lalle [lállè:], while lālē ‘welcome!’ appears as lale without tone or length marks. This may reflect a decision to orient the dictionary toward speakers fluent in Hausa, whose writing system does fine without any tone or length marks. But from the standpoint of those not conversant with Hausa pronunciation—including non-native-speaking scholars, students, and everyday Nigerians interested in studying or acquiring the language—what a shame to exclude this information. Even in the ambiguous cases, where tone and/or length distinguish one lexeme from another, the new volume departs from the customary practice in Hausa linguistics of marking length with a macron and leaving high tones unmarked, which was used in the Yale volumes and which is generally followed in this review. Instead, as the above examples [lállé:] and [lállè:] illustrate, the new transcriptions follow the IPA.
One of the great strengths of this dictionary is that, like the Yale volumes it is based on and to a greater extent than most other Hausa dictionaries, Hausa-English entries typically include several definitions and, where appropriate, common short phrases built on the entry word. For example, the entry for rawā ‘dance’ includes a couple of metaphorical glosses along with a half dozen phrases headed by rawā, such as rawar kâi ‘quivering with eagerness; shaking one’s head while speaking,’ and two idiomatic expressions containing the headword. Meanwhile, English-Hausa entries contain ample examples to illustrate the range of uses of Hausa words in context. For example, English part has seven groups of Hausa equivalents, some groups with more than one equivalent and each one accompanied by an illustrative sentence or phrase.
This finely edited volume suffers from several production problems. Choosing a paperback format for a 627-page work like this was a stretch, and the glued binding and stitching started to give way as soon as I began thumbing through. With normal use, I’m afraid the book will soon have to be carried around in a bag. This perhaps makes it less important to know whether the paper and binding are acid-free, a question not answered in the book. Another failing is that where we expect to page 566, a second copy of page 556 appears instead. This means that the volume is missing all the entries intended for page 566. That would include words from straight to strike, judging from what’s in the Yale volume. While the pages are generally attractive, with highly readable print and margins of 1.5 cm on all sides, the layout on many pages suffers from incorrect alignment between the baseline of the headword and the baseline of the rest of the entry. Sometimes the headword is too high, sometimes too low, sometimes just right. This may have happened because headword font is from a different font family, with conflicting leading and baseline parameters that may have been difficult to reconcile. This will not be too distracting to the user, and otherwise the pages look great.
An electronic version of this dictionary has yet to be announced, but one hopes that it will eventually come. An ebook could easily avoid some if not all of the production problems, could prove much easier to distribute than the bound version, and might well be more convenient for many prospective users. It might also give this excellent new dictionary a boost over existing online versions. Until then, there are at least three large Hausa-English dictionaries online. The most recent and easiest to use is (Fagge) Ƙamusun Hausa da Turanci, https://hausadictionary.com, prepared by Mahmud Fagge with short, simple English glosses for of all 15,754 entries in Ƙamusun Hausa, the Hausa-Hausa dictionary mentioned earlier, at the time of writing, about 250 more. Bargery’s massive Hausa-English Dictionary (39,000 words) also can be searched on the web at http://maguzawa.dyndns.ws/. Finally, of special interest for historical Hausa studies, a scanned html version of Robinson 1899 first edition of Dictionary of the Hausa Language (237 pages) is available at https://www.google.com/books/edition/Dictionary_of_the_Hausa_Language/RSkUAAAAYAAJ.