What is the true meaning of "Ubuntu"

[jhsjues]

Hello, I am a linguist & I actively study more than 16 spoken languages & the single pure linguistical & true meaning of the occurrence of the word "Ubuntu" is in the Hebrew language where the word means "Desert Stone".

[craig10x]

It's taken from the african word which means "humanity to others"...you can read it about it here from the "horse's mouth" ;)
http://www.ubuntu.com/about/about-ubuntu/

[grahammechanical]

the single pure linguistical & true meaning of the occurrence of the word "Ubuntu" is in the Hebrew language where the word means "Desert Stone".

You really should provide some evidence for this statement. Otherwise I shall take it as your personal opinion and nothing more than that. Can you provide references to written Hebrew literature of a similar concept to that presently held in Southern Africa as to the meaning of this word? Can you provide evidence of an etymological link from a Hebrew word (ancient or modern) to the present African word?

I think this thread should be moved to the Cafe section.

Regards.

[QIII]

I think this thread should be moved to the Cafe section.

Agreed. Moved.

[deadflowr]

Maybe the "about Ubuntu" needs to narrow it down, there are likely hundreds to thousands of african languages.;)

[sffvba[e0rt]

Maybe the "about Ubuntu" needs to narrow it down, there are likely hundreds to thousands of african languages.;)


Ubuntu (/uːˈbʊntuː/ oo-BUUN-too; Zulu/Xhosa pronunciation: [ùɓúntʼú]) is a Nguni Bantu term (literally, "human-ness") roughly translating to "human kindness."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_%28philosophy%29

[Don_Stahl]

Well, I believe there are a lot of words in different languages which have similar sounds. It looks like one Aramaic word for "stone" would be rendered in English as "eben", which is reasonably close to the first two syllables of ubuntu. "Desert" is variously given as arabah or jeshimon or horbah, so if the OP is using "eben" as the first part he must not be using any of the words I found for "desert". ( http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04749a.htm )

But I'm just Googling around, and the references are all to transliterations of Biblical languages. I'm no expert.

It's a moot point, of course. We all know how Shuttleworth chose Ubuntu as the name of the Linux distro, though, and it wasn't from ancient Hebrew.

[lisati]

Don't be fooled by what my French teacher would have referred to as false friends. There are words in some languages which sound similar to words in other languages but have different meanings. I live in a multilingual area where several Pacific Island languages are spoken. The Māori word whanau is related to the Samoan word fanau, but has a different meaning: whanau = family, fanau = child (or children).

There used to be a video clip included on the Ubuntu installation disk with the late Nelson Mandela explaining Ubuntu. Several people have uploaded it to Youtube; one such copy can be found at http://youtu.be/j7iOKZe9oN8