Words to Your Mother: Hakuna matata

Yep.  Straight from Biblical Hebrew to Disney.  If it makes you feel any better, I'm far more interested in the phrase's larger context than it's musical one.

Hakuna matata means "no..."  Uh, that is, it means "here there are no concerns".  The phrase is in Swahili, and, no, it was not made up for the movie.  In fact, a literal Kiswahili translation of "no worries" would be "hamna shida".  Hakuna matata is a rather common Swahili phrase, and has appeared in plenty of other places outside of the movie whose name I have narrowly avoided mentioning thus far.

You can take apart the phrase as follows:

haku: Locative prefix; "there are not".

na: Negative suffix.

ma: Plural prefix.

[ji]tata: Concerns.

technorati tags:words, vocabulary, hakuna matata, hamna shida, Swahili, Kiswahili

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