Datasets:

AikoGraphics
/

LugbaraDictionary

@@ -41,7 +41,7 @@ Lost in Translation (Dreamcast)
 Introduction:
-Created painstakingly from scratch with gritty nerves on the 3rd Agofe's 90th birthday afternoon (Saturday 26th November 2016) after a South Sudanese Acholi-Madi in Tennessee, USA (named Suzy Abdelfarag who speaks fluent Arabic but disliked the upper Arabian Sudanese who tormented her people before independence) asked me via Facebook to teach her Luganda (so that she could understand her favourite Ugandan musicians eg Jackie Chandiru and Mowzey Radio), but dismissively wanted more than just the basic words I started the lessons with. While checking out a Luganda Dictionary at www.archive.org, I literally snapped because of what I had noticed about self-learning versus waiting for the teacher to teach during my school career. Reinforced every year, Aiko's Lugbara Dictionary is where the Old and New meet (like Synthetic Imagination). It's a Lugbara Language Museum for historical, scientific and cultural research: Use Ctrl + F (key combination) or add this one-page electronic dictionary as a file to an AI chatbot to swiftly find any words you want! I'm only human and apologise in advance for any mistakes: I've cleaned thousands of errors by the way (realised a lot spiritually while proofreading). I was even tempted to delete all the data, but resilience convinced me to keep editing; therefore corrections and suggestions are always welcome through WhatsApp: +256-781-345712 or Email: aikoug@gmail.com! I ask the Holy Spirit to guide me in the name of JESUS (like the Tower of Babel language multiplication by YHWH in Genesis 11 and Galileans filled with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost amazingly speaking other languages in Acts 2:1-13)! Every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that: JESUS Christ is Lord [YESU Kurisito ni Opi] (Philippians 2:10-11)!
 Pronunciation Parameters:
 In Lugbara phonology, every Lugbara word ends with one of the five vowels eg nyanya = tomato; mucele = rice; karoti = carrot; ovakedo = avocado; osu = bean. Letters Q [Kaya] and X [Ekisa, Alamakanda in Aringa dialect] are not used (meaning only 24 can do on a keyboard), but four unique ones with an apostrophe are added: 'B, 'D, 'W and 'Y (which all sound like putting H after them though personal names omit the apostrophe). The 28 letters in the Simplified Lugbara Alphabet sound like this: Ah, Ba, Bha, Cha, Da, Dha, Eh, Fa, Ga, Ha, Ii (as in Israel), Ja, Ka, La, Ma, Na, Oh, Pa, Ra, Sa, Ta, Uw (as in yoUth), Va, Wa, Wha, Ya, Yha, Za. Since nursery in Jinja (Busoga), I was confusingly taught to recite English vowels separately in a different acoustic compared to the vowels in the ABC to Z(ed) rhyme, but later realised that the former sequence was exactly how Lugbara vowels sound; the standard consonant clusters in Lugbara are: DR, HW, MB, MV, ND, NDR, NJ, NG, NY, NZ and TR. Other diphthong clusters (or noteworthy phonetics) include the following:
@@ -225,7 +225,7 @@ aci (n) fire, light, electricity, energy, WENRECo's Diza, Umeme's Yaka, heat; jo
 aci aci (v) share; walked; hot hot (also aciaci)
-Aci inyupiku ri (n) Hell, eternal fire eg Dimitiri Azakovu eri o'duko engazu Aci inyupiku ri. = Dimitri Azzakov heard sounds from Hell.
 Aci Inzini (n) Electricity Engine, fuel power plant in Osu Village run by WENRECo (West Nile Rural Electrification Company) since the early 2000s supplying electricity to Arua Town before the anticipated Nyagak Dams were finally switched on, the second fuel-powered station was built in Ewuata
@@ -1379,7 +1379,7 @@ be (prep) with eg "Mu Oli Be (filimu)" efu eli 1939 si. = "Gone With The Wind (f
 Beliji (n) Belgium (also Beluji)
-bendera (n) flag (also bendere), presidential standard eg Romario enga Brazilu ma bendera 'bua. = Romario raised Brazil's flag up.
 beseni (n) basin (also bafu)
@@ -1403,7 +1403,7 @@ bibia (n) (ear)phone (also yakani, simu)
 Bibia (n) place near Osu
-Biblia (n) Bible (also Bibilia, Baibo) eg Peshensi ma Biblia okazaru. = Patience's Bible is brown.
 bidi (n) sharp pointed long metal tool attached to a wooden pole
@@ -1457,7 +1457,7 @@ bokisi (n) box
 bolo bara (n) type of wood
-Bondo (n) place south of Arua City eg Mubiru ni "Bondo New Life Guesthouse"-a. = Mubiru is at Bondo New Life Guesthouse.
 bonga (n) fist greeting, (v) make a fist to meet another person's fist
@@ -1467,7 +1467,7 @@ boroko (n) hut, temporary house
 borondua (n) rebel (also adui) eg Acani ni borondua. = Achan is a rebel.
-boti (n) boot(s), bot
 bowaholu (n) borehole (also boholu, semenikia?)
@@ -1493,7 +1493,7 @@ bunia (n) fist, boxing sport
 burasi (n) brush
-Burazilu (n) Brazil, Brasil eg Ro-Ri-Ro avi Burazilu ni eli 90 yi ma-a. = Romario, Rivaldo and Ronaldo da Lima played for Brazil in the 90s.
 bureki (n) brake eg Nyaku ma bureki ce-i ra. = Earth's brake got torn. (fig.)
@@ -6495,7 +6495,7 @@ suzi (n) shoe(s)
 Tt
-ta (adv) used to be, (n) sound when sth is slapped or struck; (v) endure eg Hotelu Arua ma ru ta Hotelu Kalifonia. = Hotel Arua's name used to be (called) Hotel California.
 ta mba (v) take care, keep safe
@@ -6621,7 +6621,7 @@ timu (n) team
 tingatinga amvu 'yapiri (n) tractor machine, handheld plougher that can use 3 litres of oil for 3 acres (pronounced tingatinga anvu 'yapiri)
-tinzeta (n) speaking, spoken language (also tinzeza) eg "BBC" ni tinzeta imba. = BBC teaches spoken language.
 tipa (n) tipper truck eg 'Ba da sende tawuni-a tipasi. = Money was poured (or dumped) in (the) town using a tipper.
@@ -6673,9 +6673,9 @@ tri (v) brush, rub, curse, smear
 tro (adv) even though, even if, (v) become soft like overcooked meat
-trotro (adj) equal, the same eg Kijomoro "FC" azini "URA" de mupira trotro. = Kijomoro FC and URA ended the football game equal.
-tru (v) forgive, remove (clothes), take off, untie, move eg Bishopu Yohana Babu kini: Itru 'ba! = Bishop John Babu said: Forgive people!
 truta (n) forgiveness (also truza, pata) eg Oguo ai truta YESU vu musalaba sia. = The thief begged for forgiveness from JESUS on the cross.
@@ -8362,9 +8362,9 @@ Semakula = Male-given name with meaning related to gains [Se maku la = Pulled th
 LOST IN TRANSLATION (DREAMCAST):
-This encyclopedic research documentation is inspired by (and dedicated to) Cynthia Letasi, aka Rejoice (The Beautyful One and Green Riding Hood - now Mrs. Mungufeni born on Thursday 17th August 1995; roger that Ayi Kwei Armah) who changed my worldview like a valuable pearl (Matthew 13:45-46), worth far above rubies (Proverbs 31:10), Kumari in Nepal (Orient) or Divine Feminine between 2001-6; made me feel like Bob Harris in Arua (not Japan) around 2003 because she was 11 years younger than me. This girl drained amalala ga kibuga [Luganda for: city haughtiness] out of me. To be honest, she was my first true "superhigh" crush within Arua (West Nile) after the Y2K Computer Bug Doom's Day didn't happen though I never told her my exact heartfelt reality for multiple years (Just tried to show it through kind, unapologetic, smile-inducing treatment until she boldly confessed something directly to me that I will treasure until infinity). I adored how her glowing eyes hawked at me (One of my favourite, unforgettable memories about CL). Furthermore, her lookalikes included the volatile Tonto Dikeh (Nigerian), lyric-savvy Sheebah Karungi, decent Betty Mpologoma, unflinching Victoria Bagaya, worry-free Spice Diana as well as easygoing Scarlett Johansson who automatically became my all-time favourites; I knew her before all of them except maybe Betty who began her diamond singing career in 1999. Queenie, one of the lead vocalists in the Miracle Cathedral Rubaga (MCR) Proclaim Music choir also has that Cynthia aura plus Pretty Banks, Sheila Gashumba, etc. Even though I reconnected with Xnthi (nickname I gave her meaning Numberless or Infinite value) via Facebook at the turn of the 2010s, I did not see her again physically until Tuesday 12th February 2019 walking southwards with her darkskinned female friend on the hyper-straight Arua Avenue at the Ediofe Road Junction (while I escorted my cousin to a printshop before he rushed to Onduparaka to see his sister). That was about 13 unlucky years since the last time, but only three surreal days after dreaming about her. I smiled like GOD's sun was shining on me in the afternoon before rush hour; it was the same day Onduparaka drew 0-0 with URA FC in the Ugandan top-flight league. Obsession is not a crime, just harness it like human solar electricity. Disconnection is re-direction; too much love will heal you. Love is indestructible and the Greatest Thing: I admired Cynthia's pleasant appearance and supadupa fluency at a very tender age of 6 to 11 and felt inspired to polish my own linguistics by reading Lugbara afresh since I learnt my mother tongue despite being downgraded as backward in Busoga (Birth to 11 years) and Buganda only by listening to Lugbara people talk. Even though I spoke and understood it, I couldn't transcribe Lugbara well like English but when moonstruck by our Mt. Wati Road (Arua) neighbour's adorable brownskinned daughter, I was motivated to re-study this vernacular from Northwestern Uganda in black and white (using music lyrics, Biblia, Straight Talk newspapers, brochures, internet articles, other literature, then a Fountain Publishers 2009 dictionary compiled by Willy Ngaka, Edward O'du'bua and Paul Iga Ongua [bought for a Twenty10 gig from Sarah Ojirot at Uganda Deaf Women's Organisation; my Design Manager from UCU named Edmund Asingwire (a Munyankole) also hired me to do artwork for him and Jolynn Investments Limited in Lugbara], exclusively English Dictionaries, a Chinese Dictionary for finding Word Classes plus asked various people including my Parents and Facebook friends like Okitembeki Ndengendu [Enoch Opika Diku], etc). Consequently, I would perhaps grasp Lugbara the way ShaoLan Hsueh created Chineasy, then fabricate my own Synthetic Artificial Lugbara Technology (SALT), Informative Synthetic Encoder (ISE) or Ojapi Converter. My Big Brother Victor Draman(i) Afayo (an I.T. Specialist based in KLA City) wanted to create a Lugbara.net website and gave me the assignment of doing research for him in the latter 2000s. I also decided to create my own Lugbara Culture Blog (Amazing World of Lugbara) around 2008, a process that inspired this encyclopedic Dictionary too. The words here are the ones used on UBC Radio (formerly Radio Uganda), Voice Of Life (probably since 1997 though I started listening in 2000), Arua One (since 2002), Koboko FM, Nile FM (since 2004), Radio Pacis, Access FM (since Monday 19th March 2018) plus BTN Television (from 2003), Westnile TV (from around 2020) and in Voice Commands for Airtel Uganda, et cetera. During one of the Mobile Monday sessions in KLA City, I asked a Google Executive from Germany who came to UG around 2012 if Lugbara could be added to the advanced Google Translate Machine. He replied that he would forward my Concern to the relevant Office. I also posted a Request at Wikimedia for a Lugbara Wiktionary but there weren't enough Volunteer Editors as is the Requirement for the Project to hatch; a Lugbarapedia would be the eventual outcome. Tualu.org [West Nile Portal] announced that they were working on a Project of over 500 Lugbara Words but I could not find the draft PDF. Nevertheless, Tualu posted a long and thorough Dictionary of Lugbara Personal Names by Alex Matua Asumi and his Colleagues: Fortunate Drateru, Moses Dramiga and Proscovia Adrupiyo. There are no Names listed with the Letters H, Q and X but the ones posted are more than enough, I commend them for that, a Masterpiece about Ru'daza Lugbara niri (Naming in the Lugbara Tradition). Saidi Omar Dramani (Islamic University In Uganda - Mbale) also posted a PDF of his 2007 Dissertation Research for a Lugbarati Dictionary; it was very helpful. Language has to be preserved through documentation and transmitted to anyone connected or interested because cultural heritage represents a collective identity of values, diversity, traditions and assets passed around from generation to generation eg my parents (James + Elizabeth Dramani) to me, though my mother departed in Twenty22 (during Volume 7). Some relatives and natives would laugh at my pronunciations or choice of words but it didn't phase me. I've never been ashamed to be called Omulugwara even if it is a byword for stupidity, Naked People (Only Karamoja was ranked before us) and backwardness among some communities. Aren't we all descendants of Noah, the Flood Survivor? One day, I bypassed two dudes on Acacia Avenue in KLA and heard them speak what sounded like broken Lugbara; I reasoned later that it might have been Madi language. Also, Aringa is like Lugbara Patois or Filipino. During May 2023, someone asked me why I study Lugbara yet it is not useful and I told him not to diss my mother tongue like that; garbage or waste appears worthless until it's recycled and given value: Lugbara is a multinational language spoken mainly across three colonial borders which converge at Salia Musala (about 2 hours by car northwards from Arua City). There are nine Lugbara clans in DR Congo (Kari Culture Minister - John Godo, a UPC stalwart, taught me that in 2009: When I went to Ariwara [inside DRC] the following year, I was stunned by the amount of Lugbara songs playing loudly near the markets). #SpeakLugbara on International Mother Tongue Day (21st February)! I strongly believe Generative AI can learn Lugbarati and make it reuseable and applicable in various fields; Deep Learning Indaba (DLI), Ambani, Artificial Intelligence for Development-Africa Network (AI4D-Africa), Hugging Face, Deep Site, Foundation for Lugbarati Development Initiative (FLUDI) or Lugbara GPT type-of-way. Live translation of President M7's speeches by people like Fred Bada, John Ondoma, etc plus other arrangements eg crusades, conferences, weddings, funerals and so on can also be a reference... In December 2013, the Lugbarati Language Board proposed an Orthography Guide with 45 letters (including 7 vowels and 38 consonants). Tonal Lugbara literature with its many character symbols (accents, crosses, dashes or hyphens, dots, umlauts, etc) seems advanced plus crowdily complex (like the new books commissioned from DR Congo that I used to see at the Radio Pacis Printery) and scares away learners or researchers, but the simpler version shared in this wordbook is legit too... Lugbara funeral songs have been replaced with church hymns and modern Gospel music... In my Allegory of Artificial Ignorance: For machines to learn Lugbara, humans (both self-motivated and paid contributors) must train them or organise datasets for AI to decode unsupervised... Artificial Dreams (or Hallucinations) can also come true like Dreamcast... My makeshift Word Interchange Theory (WIT) from 1996 was not far-fetched afterall (feeling like Michael Jordan versus Detroit Pistons: No rules)...
-When I was in Senior 5 (during 2001), I told my hostelmates that one day there will be a radio device that converts words spoken on air into text like S2T (Speech-2-Text) or Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and displayed on a screen, not just lyrics as Jango Radio does, but conversations too (Inspired by the way we transcribed classroom dictation from teachers). I was labelled "mulalu [Luganda for: mad]" but dreams are not hopeless; GOD's Time brings them to life for instance Google Assistant, Meet (In-chat captions), Apple's Siri, TranSay (My Favourite), Lingmo One2One, Translate 4 Me, Waverly Labs Pilot, Mesay, Langogo, Translaty, MUAMA Enence, Xiaomi AI Translator, Clik, WT2 Translator, Travis, LeTrans, Sigmo, NTT DoCoMo Translation Service, OBTranslate (from Nigeria), Logbar ili, OpenAI's ChatGPT or Whisper, Assembly AI, iFlytek, etc. Twitter (X) Spaces is also not very far from my Ongo (Ojapi Converter) vision. Zero-Shot Machine Translation tech is a model that can learn to translate words into another language without having to see any examples... Meta's Universal Speech Translator is a very ambitious AI research project that might improve language-mixing or Computer-Assisted Translation like Google Translate does... LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) which Blake Lamoine labelled "sentient" was originally introduced as Meena in 2020. It's a conversational Large Language Model (LLM) built by Google... The Madi-Lugbara language is related to the languages of Southern Nigeria eg Yoruba, Igbo, Edo, Iduma, Igala, Igbira, Gbari and Nupe. In addition, we can include Ijo and Kalabari of the Niger Delta plus the Bariba - north of Yoruba and Aja (Ewe) spoken in Southern Dahomey (Benin), Togo and South-Eastern Ghana... Some people consider Lugbara a dialect of Madi but many do not accept this theory. In fact, a survey concluded that the Ogoko, Okollo and Rigbo dialects (which are considered Southern Madi or Madi Ndri) should be categorised as dialects of Lugbara. Besides, we share the same names, numbers and many words. The only mother tongue interference I have heard from tribemates is mixing S with SH like when saying "soap" and "shop" or -TION with -SON eg "information" becomes "informason". Some interchange D with TH eg "together" is spoken as "togeder" while "three" may be pronounced "tiri" but most times, pronunciation is okay. Exactly 11 days before I created my electronic Lugbara Dictionary in Twenty16, Google Translate switched to Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) - translating whole sentences at a time rather than piece by piece which GT used to do through Statistical Machine Translation since 28th April 2006. GNMT improves the Quality of Translation because it uses an Example-based Machine Translation (EBMT) in which the system learns from millions of examples... In 2020, with support from the Hewlett Foundation, Sunbird AI commenced the African language technology project. They created a large multilingual parallel text dataset of Ugandan languages, with translations in Acholi, Ateso, Luganda, Lugbara and Runyankole. On Saturday 11th October 2025, an AI Language Model called Sunflower (developed by Sunbird) was officially launched and it is described as "the ChatGPT for Uganda"... GeoPoll (a global research organisation) has datasets in Lugbara while JEHOVAH's Witnesses translate their publications into Lugbara (Available at www.jw.org). Companies like Airtel, dfcu Bank, etc also use Lugbara in their electronic platforms... It was very unreal to discover on Sunday 10th September 2023 while googling for "Lugbara AI" that the mother of Jeff Dean (55 year old Google AI Lead then) speaks "fluent Lugbara"; she lived in West Nile when Jeffrey was 5 years old. I guess she knows that Lugbara is learnable by machines; Meta introduced its own AI on WhatsApp a few days later. I love the fact that it paraphrases websites rejected by Wikipedia. Mark Zuckerberg believes AI will make superintelligent multi-lingual connections possible for all. When you copy some of the BigAMBO [Words] in this dictionary and paste as a chat message to Meta AI like a Paul and Silas jailbreak, it can learn Ugandan Lugbara by reading patterns and fine-tuning itself to chat with you even though it used a strange vocabulary as Lugbara in Twenty24 (probably Central or West African) like TranslatorMind the following year. Sam Altman (CEO at Open AI) also revealed that you can add knowledge and create a custom GPT by uploading files in the GPTs App Store. Self-Adapting or Adjusting LLMs (SEAL or SALMs) will learn new words by themselves... Vibe-coding can also help you create Lugbara chatbots, games eg Scrabble or Pictionary plus other software for Investors, Traders, Friends, Lovers, In-laws, Tourists, Media Watchers, Music Listeners, Conference Audiences, Ethnodoxologists, Migrants, Refugees and those supertalented in Xenoglossy... The ISO 639-3 Language Code for Lugbara is lgg while the Glottocode is lugb1240, but I wish the language code for Lugbara was simply Lbr; it corresponds better though already taken by Lohorung language (endangered Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Nepal). The quick, brown fox jumps over the lazy dog!
 [GODisgreat!]

 Introduction:
+Created painstakingly from scratch with gritty nerves on the 3rd Agofe's 90th birthday afternoon (Saturday 26th November 2016) after a South Sudanese Acholi-Madi in Tennessee, USA (named Suzy Abdelfarag [aka Mamur, Akema] who spoke fluent Arabic, but disliked the upper Arabian Sudanese who tormented her people before independence) asked me via Facebook to teach her Luganda (so that she could understand her favourite Ugandan musicians eg Jackie Chandiru and Mowzey Radio). Dismissively, she wanted more than just the basic words I started the lessons with, but while checking out a Luganda Dictionary at www.archive.org, I literally snapped because of what I had noticed about self-learning versus waiting for the teacher to teach during my school career. Reinforced every year, Aiko's Lugbara Dictionary is where the Old and New meet (like Synthetic Imagination). It's a Lugbara Language Museum for historical, scientific and cultural research: Use Ctrl + F (key combination) or add this one-page electronic dictionary as a file to an AI chatbot to swiftly find any words you want! I'm only human and apologise in advance for any mistakes: I've cleaned thousands of errors by the way (realised a lot spiritually while proofreading). I was even tempted to delete all the data, but resilience convinced me to keep editing; therefore corrections and suggestions are always welcome through WhatsApp: +256-781-345712 or Email: aikoug@gmail.com! I ask the Holy Spirit to guide me in the name of JESUS (like Tower of Babel language multiplication by YHWH in Genesis 11 and Galileans filled with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost amazingly speaking other languages in Acts 2:1-13)! Every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that: JESUS Christ is Lord [YESU Kurisito ni Opi] (Philippians 2:10-11)!
 Pronunciation Parameters:
 In Lugbara phonology, every Lugbara word ends with one of the five vowels eg nyanya = tomato; mucele = rice; karoti = carrot; ovakedo = avocado; osu = bean. Letters Q [Kaya] and X [Ekisa, Alamakanda in Aringa dialect] are not used (meaning only 24 can do on a keyboard), but four unique ones with an apostrophe are added: 'B, 'D, 'W and 'Y (which all sound like putting H after them though personal names omit the apostrophe). The 28 letters in the Simplified Lugbara Alphabet sound like this: Ah, Ba, Bha, Cha, Da, Dha, Eh, Fa, Ga, Ha, Ii (as in Israel), Ja, Ka, La, Ma, Na, Oh, Pa, Ra, Sa, Ta, Uw (as in yoUth), Va, Wa, Wha, Ya, Yha, Za. Since nursery in Jinja (Busoga), I was confusingly taught to recite English vowels separately in a different acoustic compared to the vowels in the ABC to Z(ed) rhyme, but later realised that the former sequence was exactly how Lugbara vowels sound; the standard consonant clusters in Lugbara are: DR, HW, MB, MV, ND, NDR, NJ, NG, NY, NZ and TR. Other diphthong clusters (or noteworthy phonetics) include the following:
 aci aci (v) share; walked; hot hot (also aciaci)
+Aci inyupiku ri (n) Hell, eternal fire eg Dimitri Azakovu eri o'duko engazu Aci inyupiku ri. = Dimitri Azzakov heard sounds from Hell.
 Aci Inzini (n) Electricity Engine, fuel power plant in Osu Village run by WENRECo (West Nile Rural Electrification Company) since the early 2000s supplying electricity to Arua Town before the anticipated Nyagak Dams were finally switched on, the second fuel-powered station was built in Ewuata
 Beliji (n) Belgium (also Beluji)
+bendera (n) flag (also bendere), presidential standard eg Romario enga Burazilu ma bendera 'bua. = Romario raised Brazil's flag up.
 beseni (n) basin (also bafu)
 Bibia (n) place near Osu
+Biblia (n) Bible (also Bibilia, Baibo) eg Pesenisi ma Biblia okazaru. = Patience's Bible is brown.
 bidi (n) sharp pointed long metal tool attached to a wooden pole
 bolo bara (n) type of wood
+Bondo (n) place south of Arua City eg Mubiru ni Bondo "New Life Guesthouse"-a. = Mubiru is at Bondo New Life Guesthouse.
 bonga (n) fist greeting, (v) make a fist to meet another person's fist
 borondua (n) rebel (also adui) eg Acani ni borondua. = Achan is a rebel.
+boti (n) boot (also butu), (ro)bot eg Whayachi ma Mvi azini Tombusitoni ki boti aco ni. = Son of Whyachi and Tombstone are battlebots.
 bowaholu (n) borehole (also boholu, semenikia?)
 burasi (n) brush
+Burazilu (n) Brazil, Brazilia, Brasil eg Ro-Ri-Ro avi Burazilu ni eli 90 yi ma-a. = Romario, Rivaldo and Ronaldo da Lima played for Brazil in the 90s.
 bureki (n) brake eg Nyaku ma bureki ce-i ra. = Earth's brake got torn. (fig.)
 Tt
+ta (adv) used to be, (n) sound when sth is slapped or struck; (v) endure eg Hoteli Arua ma ru andra Hoteli Kalifonia. = Hotel Arua's name used to be Hotel California.
 ta mba (v) take care, keep safe
 tingatinga amvu 'yapiri (n) tractor machine, handheld plougher that can use 3 litres of oil for 3 acres (pronounced tingatinga anvu 'yapiri)
+tinzeta (n) speaking, spoken language (also tinzeza) eg BBC ni tinzeta imba. = BBC teaches spoken language.
 tipa (n) tipper truck eg 'Ba da sende tawuni-a tipasi. = Money was poured (or dumped) in (the) town using a tipper.
 tro (adv) even though, even if, (v) become soft like overcooked meat
+trotro (adj) equal, the same eg Kijomoro FC azini URA de mupira trotro. = Kijomoro FC and URA ended the football game equal.
+tru (v) forgive, remove (clothes), take off, untie, move eg Bisopu Yohana Matogo Babu kini: Itru 'ba! = Bishop John Matogo Babu said: Forgive people!
 truta (n) forgiveness (also truza, pata) eg Oguo ai truta YESU vu musalaba sia. = The thief begged for forgiveness from JESUS on the cross.
 LOST IN TRANSLATION (DREAMCAST):
+This encyclopedic research documentation is inspired by (and dedicated to) Cynthia Letasi, aka Rejoice (The Beautyful One and Green Riding Hood - now Mrs. Mungufeni born on Thursday 17th August 1995; roger that Ayi Kwei Armah) who changed my worldview like a valuable pearl (Matthew 13:45-46), worth far above rubies (Proverbs 31:10), Kumari in Nepal (Orient) or Divine Feminine between 2001-6; made me feel like Bob Harris in Arua (not Japan) around 2003 because she was 11 years younger than me. This girl drained amalala ga kibuga [Luganda for: city haughtiness] out of me. To be honest, she was my first true "superhigh" crush within Arua (West Nile) after the Y2K Computer Bug Doom's Day didn't happen though I never told her my exact heartfelt reality for multiple years (Just tried to show it through kind, unapologetic, smile-inducing treatment until she boldly confessed something directly to me that I will treasure until infinity). I adored how her glowing eyes hawked at me (One of my favourite, unforgettable memories about CL). Furthermore, her lookalikes included the volatile Tonto Dikeh (Nigerian), lyric-savvy Sheebah Karungi, decent Betty Mpologoma, unflinching Victoria Bagaya, worry-free Spice Diana as well as easygoing Scarlett Johansson who automatically became my all-time favourites; I knew her before all of them except maybe Betty who began her diamond singing career in 1999. Queenie, one of the lead vocalists in the Miracle Cathedral Rubaga (MCR) Proclaim Music choir also has that Cynthia aura plus Pretty Banks, Sheila Gashumba, etc. Even though I reconnected with Xnthi (nickname I gave her meaning Numberless or Infinite value) via Facebook at the turn of the 2010s, I did not see her again physically until Tuesday 12th February 2019 walking southwards with her darkskinned female friend on the hyper-straight Arua Avenue at the Ediofe Road Junction (while I escorted my cousin to a printshop before he rushed to Onduparaka to see his sister). That was about 13 unlucky years since the last time, but only three surreal days after dreaming about her. I smiled like GOD's sun was shining on me in the afternoon before rush hour; it was the same day Onduparaka drew 0-0 with URA FC in the Ugandan top-flight league. Obsession is not a crime, just harness it like human solar electricity. Disconnection is re-direction; too much love will heal you. Love is indestructible and the Greatest Thing: I admired Cynthia's pleasant appearance and supadupa fluency at a very tender age of 6 to 11 and felt inspired to polish my own linguistics by reading Lugbara afresh since I learnt my mother tongue despite being downgraded as backward in Busoga (Birth to 11 years) and Buganda only by listening to Lugbara people talk. Even though I spoke and understood it, I couldn't transcribe Lugbara well like English but when moonstruck by our Mt. Wati Road (Arua) neighbour's adorable brownskinned daughter, I was motivated to re-study this vernacular from Northwestern Uganda in black and white (using music lyrics, Biblia, Straight Talk newspapers, brochures, internet articles, other literature, then a Fountain Publishers 2009 dictionary compiled by Willy Ngaka, Edward O'du'bua and Paul Iga Ongua [bought for a Twenty10 gig from Sarah Ojirot at Uganda Deaf Women's Organisation; my Design Manager from UCU named Edmund Asingwire (a Munyankole) also hired me to do artwork for him and Jolynn Investments Limited in Lugbara], exclusively English Dictionaries, a Chinese Dictionary for finding Word Classes plus asked various people including my Parents and Facebook friends like Okitembeki Ndengendu [Enoch Opika Diku], etc). Consequently, I would perhaps grasp Lugbara the way ShaoLan Hsueh created Chineasy, then fabricate my own Synthetic Artificial Lugbara Technology (SALT), Informative Synthetic Encoder (ISE) or Ojapi Converter. My Big Brother Victor Draman(i) Afayo (an I.T. Specialist based in KLA City) wanted to create a Lugbara.net website and gave me the assignment of doing research for him in the latter 2000s. I also decided to create my own Lugbara Culture Blog (Amazing World of Lugbara) around 2008, a process that inspired this encyclopedic Dictionary too. The words here are the ones used on UBC Radio (formerly Radio Uganda), Voice Of Life (probably since 1997 though I started listening in 2000), Arua One (since 2002), Koboko FM, Nile FM (since 2004), Radio Pacis, Access FM (since Monday 19th March 2018) plus BTN Television (from 2003), Westnile TV (from around 2020) and in Voice Commands for Airtel Uganda, et cetera. During one of the Mobile Monday sessions in KLA City, I asked a Google Executive from Germany who came to UG around 2012 if Lugbara could be added to the advanced Google Translate Machine. He replied that he would forward my Concern to the relevant Office. I also posted a Request at Wikimedia for a Lugbara Wiktionary but there weren't enough Volunteer Editors as is the Requirement for the Project to hatch; a Lugbarapedia would be the eventual outcome. Tualu.org [West Nile Portal] announced that they were working on a Project of over 500 Lugbara Words but I could not find the draft PDF. Nevertheless, Tualu posted a long and thorough Dictionary of Lugbara Personal Names by Alex Matua Asumi and his Colleagues: Fortunate Drateru, Moses Dramiga and Proscovia Adrupiyo. There were no Names listed with the Letters H, Q and X, but the ones posted are more than enough; I commend them for that, a Masterpiece about Ru'daza Lugbara niri (Naming in the Lugbara Tradition). Saidi Omar Dramani (Islamic University In Uganda - Mbale) also posted a PDF of his 2007 Dissertation Research for a Lugbarati Dictionary; it was very helpful. Language has to be preserved through documentation and transmitted to anyone connected or interested because cultural heritage represents a collective identity of values, diversity, traditions and assets passed around from generation to generation eg my parents (James + Elizabeth Dramani) to me, though my mother departed in Twenty22 (during Volume 7). Some relatives and natives would laugh at my pronunciations or choice of words but it didn't phase me. I've never been ashamed to be called Omulugwara even if it is a byword for stupidity, Naked People (Only Karamoja was ranked before us) and backwardness among some communities. Aren't we all descendants of Noah, the Flood Survivor? One day, I bypassed two dudes on Acacia Avenue in KLA and heard them speak what sounded like broken Lugbara; I reasoned later that it might have been Madi language. Also, Aringa is like Lugbara Patois or Filipino. During May 2023, someone asked me why I study Lugbara yet it is not useful and I told him not to diss my mother tongue like that; garbage or waste appears worthless until it's recycled and given value: Lugbara is a multinational language spoken mainly across three colonial borders which converge at Salia Musala (about 2 hours by car northwards from Arua City). There are nine Lugbara clans in DR Congo (Kari Culture Minister - John Godo, a UPC stalwart, taught me that in 2009: When I went to Ariwara [inside DRC] the following year, I was stunned by the amount of Lugbara songs playing loudly near the markets). #SpeakLugbara on International Mother Tongue Day (21st February)! I strongly believe Generative AI can learn Lugbarati and make it reuseable and applicable in various fields; Deep Learning Indaba (DLI), Ambani, Artificial Intelligence for Development-Africa Network (AI4D-Africa), Hugging Face, Deep Site, Foundation for Lugbarati Development Initiative (FLUDI) or Lugbara GPT type-of-way. Live translation of President M7's speeches by people like Fred Bada, John Ondoma, etc plus other arrangements eg crusades, conferences, weddings, funerals and so on can also be a reference... In December 2013, the Lugbarati Language Board proposed an Orthography Guide with 45 letters (including 7 vowels and 38 consonants). Tonal Lugbara literature with its many character symbols (accents, crosses, dashes or hyphens, dots, umlauts, etc) seems advanced plus crowdily complex (like the new books commissioned from DR Congo that I used to see at the Radio Pacis Printery) and scares away learners or researchers, but the simpler version shared in this wordbook is legit too... Lugbara funeral songs have been replaced with church hymns and modern Gospel music... In my Allegory of Artificial Ignorance: For machines to learn Lugbara, humans (both self-motivated and paid contributors) must train them or organise datasets for AI to decode unsupervised... Artificial Dreams (or Hallucinations) can also come true like Dreamcast... My makeshift Word Interchange Theory (WIT) from 1996 was not far-fetched afterall (feeling like Michael Jordan versus Detroit Pistons: No rules)...
+When I was in Senior 5 (during 2001), I told my hostelmates that one day there will be a radio device that converts words spoken on air into text like S2T (Speech-2-Text) or Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and displayed on a screen, not just lyrics as Jango Radio does, but conversations too (Inspired by the way we transcribed classroom dictation from teachers). I was labelled "mulalu [Luganda for: mad]" but dreams are not hopeless; GOD's Time brings them to life for instance Google Assistant, Meet (In-chat captions), Apple's Siri, TranSay (My Favourite), Lingmo One2One, Translate 4 Me, Waverly Labs Pilot, Mesay, Langogo, Translaty, MUAMA Enence, Xiaomi AI Translator, Clik, WT2 Translator, Travis, LeTrans, Sigmo, NTT DoCoMo Translation Service, OBTranslate (from Nigeria), Logbar ili, OpenAI's ChatGPT or Whisper, Assembly AI, iFlytek, etc. Twitter (X) Spaces is also not very far from my Ongo (Ojapi Converter) vision. Zero-Shot Machine Translation tech is a model that can learn to translate words into another language without having to see any examples... Meta's Universal Speech Translator is a very ambitious AI research project that might improve language-mixing or Computer-Assisted Translation like Google Translate does... LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) which Blake Lamoine labelled "sentient" was originally introduced as Meena in 2020. It's a conversational Large Language Model (LLM) built by Google... The Madi-Lugbara language is related to the languages of Southern Nigeria eg Yoruba, Igbo, Edo, Iduma, Igala, Igbira, Gbari and Nupe. In addition, we can include Ijo and Kalabari of the Niger Delta plus the Bariba - north of Yoruba and Aja (Ewe) spoken in Southern Dahomey (Benin), Togo and South-Eastern Ghana... Some people consider Lugbara a dialect of Madi but many do not accept this theory. In fact, a survey concluded that the Ogoko, Okollo and Rigbo dialects which are considered Southern Madi or Madi (I)ndri, should be categorised as dialects of Lugbara. Besides, we share the same names, numbers and many words. The only mother tongue interference I have heard from tribemates is mixing S with SH like when saying "soap" and "shop" or -TION with -SON eg "information" becomes "informason". Some interchange D with TH eg "together" is spoken as "togeder" while "three" may be pronounced "tiri" but most times, pronunciation is okay. Exactly 11 days before I created my electronic Lugbara Dictionary in Twenty16, Google Translate switched to Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) translating whole sentences at a time rather than piece by piece which GT used to do through Statistical Machine Translation since 28th April 2006. GNMT improves the Quality of Translation because it uses an Example-based Machine Translation (EBMT) in which the system learns from millions of examples... In 2020, with support from the Hewlett Foundation, Sunbird AI commenced the African language technology project. They created a large multilingual parallel text dataset of Ugandan languages, with translations in Acholi, Ateso, Luganda, Lugbara and Runyankole. On Saturday 11th October 2025, an AI Language Model called Sunflower (developed by Sunbird) was officially launched and it is described as "the ChatGPT for Uganda"... GeoPoll (a global research organisation) has datasets in Lugbara while JEHOVAH's Witnesses translate their publications into Lugbara (Available at www.jw.org). Companies like MTN, dfcu Bank, etc also use Lugbara in their PR content... It was very unreal to discover on Sunday 10th September 2023 while googling for "Lugbara AI" that the mother of Jeff Dean (55 year old Google AI Lead then) speaks "fluent Lugbara"; she lived in West Nile when Jeffrey was 5 years old. I guess she knows that Lugbara is learnable by machines; Meta introduced its own AI on WhatsApp a few days later. I love the fact that it paraphrases websites rejected by Wikipedia. Mark Zuckerberg believes AI will make superintelligent multi-lingual connections possible for all. When you copy some of the BigAMBO [Words] in this dictionary and paste as a chat message to Meta AI like a Paul and Silas jailbreak, it can learn Ugandan Lugbara by reading patterns and fine-tuning itself to chat with you even though it used a strange vocabulary as Lugbara in Twenty24 (probably Central or West African) like TranslatorMind the following year. Sam Altman (CEO at Open AI) also revealed that you can add knowledge and create a custom GPT by uploading files in the GPTs App Store. Self-Adapting or Adjusting LLMs (SEAL or SALMs) will learn new words by themselves... Vibe-coding can also help you create Lugbara chatbots, games eg Scrabble or Pictionary plus other software for Investors, Traders, Friends, Lovers, In-laws, Tourists, Media Watchers, Music Listeners, Conference Audiences, Ethnodoxologists, Migrants, Refugees and those supertalented in Xenoglossy... The ISO 639-3 Language Code for Lugbara is lgg while the Glottocode is lugb1240, but I wish the language code for Lugbara was simply Lbr; it corresponds better though already taken by Lohorung language (endangered Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Nepal). The quick, brown fox jumps over the lazy dog!
 [GODisgreat!]