There is strong evidence that the item is a loan, generally including a good foreign etymology. The item is very likely a loan, but the proposed etymology is not fully convincing.
The item may or may not be a loan the particular proposed etymology is rather doubtful. No serious borrowing etymology is known to have been proposed.Ī proposed etymology is judged to lack credibility. The assignment of these values is admittedly subjective, but I have tried to be bold and minimize the intermediate values 2 and 3. However, the credibility of proposed etymologies varies a lot, and this is reflected in the scalar values in the field “Borrowed status". In the great majority of cases, the identification of loanwords and donor languages follows the existing literature on the subject. The year 1940 is a convenient cut-off date since two leading Swahili dictionaries were published in 1939 (Sacleux and Johnson). The age of words and phrases for which we have no reconstructions and that are not identified as probable loans has been classified as “no information”. The database contains almost no probable loanwords for the reconstructed stages, but loans form a large group of lexical innovations at later stages. Non-borrowed words for which we have no reconstructions are all assigned to the “pre-modern” Swahili period. No further claims are made about intermediate branches between proto-North-Eeat-Coast and proto-Bantu. Lexical reconstructions and dates for the three proto-languages follow Nurse and Hinnebusch 1993. In the case of words that are unlikely to have been borrowed, the level to which a word can be reconstructed provides a hypotheses for its estimated minimum age.
An attempt has been made to estimate the age of each word.
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