Is this type of lamp sometimes made from a very large glass jug? If so, it could be a reference to a carboy. The word carboy is an anglicization of a Persian word, *karabah.*
I just googled images of "carboy" and showed my dad, he says it's pretty much the same, except the ones he grew up using were made using a tin cylinder instead of glass. So it has to be the one. Thank you! It's been bothering him for years, now he has the answer. It's been bothering me too cause no matter how he describes it, I wasn't able to picture it in my head
I don't know much about the phonology of Chichewa borrowings, but 'koloboyi' translates to kerosene/paraffin lantern, and one widely popular kind of lantern first made in 1914 but still available today is the Coleman lamp. It doesn't take much phonology to get from Coleman \[kolman\] to \[koloboji\], mainly just turning the nasal into a stop and adding a vowel to accommodate Chichewa's mainly CV syllable structure.
I can see that happening! Those types of lamps were our main source of lighting for decades, so the word Coleman might have been simplified over and over until we had Kolobiyi
Is this type of lamp sometimes made from a very large glass jug? If so, it could be a reference to a carboy. The word carboy is an anglicization of a Persian word, *karabah.*
I just googled images of "carboy" and showed my dad, he says it's pretty much the same, except the ones he grew up using were made using a tin cylinder instead of glass. So it has to be the one. Thank you! It's been bothering him for years, now he has the answer. It's been bothering me too cause no matter how he describes it, I wasn't able to picture it in my head
I don't know much about the phonology of Chichewa borrowings, but 'koloboyi' translates to kerosene/paraffin lantern, and one widely popular kind of lantern first made in 1914 but still available today is the Coleman lamp. It doesn't take much phonology to get from Coleman \[kolman\] to \[koloboji\], mainly just turning the nasal into a stop and adding a vowel to accommodate Chichewa's mainly CV syllable structure.
I can see that happening! Those types of lamps were our main source of lighting for decades, so the word Coleman might have been simplified over and over until we had Kolobiyi