Nkuku
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Root
huku
chicken, domestic fowl
Nkuku descends on the velar velar fowl frame to Shona huku
- Confidence
- 88/100
- Root language
- Shona
- Descent begins
- nkukuSwahili
The consensus position
Mainstream comparative Bantu treats Swahili kuku / nkuku and Shona huku as parallel reflexes of Proto-Bantu *-kúkú, fowl (BLR 1218a), class 9/10, with the class 9 nasal retained in Swahili nkuku, Chichewa nkhuku and Zulu inkukhu and lost in Shona. Because the domestic fowl is an Asian domesticate reaching East Africa in the first millennium CE, many specialists suspect the form spread as an areal wanderwort with the bird rather than descending from Proto-Bantu unity, and the onomatopoeic Proto-Niger-Congo *kuku is regarded as unsupported.
The working behind this.
The full descent — 8 links from the attested form down to the root — the segment-by-segment correspondences, the phonological breakdown and the case for the derivation are behind an account.
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