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LugbaraDictionary

@@ -4277,7 +4277,7 @@ Mali (n) Mali nation in West Africa eg Halima Sise engazu Mali osi anzi oromi pa
 Maliko (n) female-given name meaning "The mother's nominal husband and family has nothing to offer her parents" or simply "No wealth"
-MALUCUFO (abbr) Madi-Lugbara Cultural Foundation
 Malunga (n) male-given name meaning "Let them look/ see!"
@@ -4361,7 +4361,9 @@ mawa (n) flower (also mawua) eg E ka 'ba iri ne leta-a, i'be mawa! = When you se
 Maye! (interj) Oh my, Oh no, I'm sorry! (Bambi in Luganda)
-mayuni (n) yam (also ayu, gurunya, girinya, likinya) eg Mayokia ni mayuni le. = Mayokia is like a yam.
 maza (adj) rotten, decayed
@@ -4449,7 +4451,7 @@ meta (n) metre measurement (meter in American English) eg Makisi Dawumani nzu ag
 meteni (n) methane gas
-meya (n) mayor eg Zohurani Mamudani ni Nyu Yoku Siti ma meya. = Zohran Mamdani is New York City's mayor.
 mgbemgbe (n) irish potatoes (also ayirisi)
@@ -4897,6 +4899,10 @@ noza (n) roaring
 ntula (n) green berries
 Nubi (adj, n) Nubian tribe
 Nubiti (n) Kinubi, Nubian language
@@ -4983,10 +4989,6 @@ nyoza (n) breaking
 nyu (v) wither, wilt
-Nyu Yoku (n) New York, the Big Apple
-Nyu Zilandi (n) New Zealand
 nyure (n) cow vaseline mixed with plant oil and smeared on skin
 nyuta (n) withering, wilting
@@ -5032,7 +5034,7 @@ Nzuku (n) Gonorrhea, Syphilis (also Oya)
 nzuta (n) run, running, athletics, sucking, drying (also nzuza) eg Akibua ma ru ku nzuta si. = Akiibua's name became popular because of athletics.
-Oo [shares some words with Uu]
 oa (v) stay, reside (also aa, archaic o'a, o-a) eg Purisika ni oa "Above The Low" vu Mvara-a. = Prisca stays near Above The Low in Mvara.
 oata (n) stay (also oaza)
@@ -6277,7 +6279,7 @@ pie (adv) also, as well (pronounced pi eh or pye)
 pilawo (n) rice cooked with small chops of meat as a recipe (also pilau) eg Tomu ni pilawo nya Dereva ma Kona-a. = Tom is eating pilau at Drivers' Corner.
-pilili (adj, n) naked, undressed (also pililiru) eg Oku yi aci pilili Nyu Besiti Hoteli Busega-a. = Women walk naked in New Best Hotel Busega.
 pilipili (n) red pepper (also piripiri)
@@ -6347,7 +6349,7 @@ Ragemu (n) suburb south of Arua City named Ragem, place along the Albert Nile be
 Ragemu Bici (n) canopied rivershed with meanders on River Enyau about 3 kilometres south of Arua City, half a kilometre from CEFORD Arua eg Bobu nya mukati towi azini i'bi iri Ragemu Bici-a. = Bob ate five loaves of bread and two fish at Ragem Beach.
-ragibi (n) rugby eg Nyu Zilandi "All Blacks" ndeki Sipiringbokisi Ragibi-a. = New Zealand All Blacks beat Springboks in rugby.
 rakaka (adv) (do sth) first, in advance (also raka) eg Mi ofe rakaka! = (You) first pay!
@@ -6847,7 +6849,7 @@ Taiwani (n) Taiwan, independent state in East Asia, the Republic of China (ROC)
 tajiri (n) rich person
-tala (n) lamp; side, hurricane eg Tala Katrina eza jo karakara Nyu Olinizi-a. = Hurricane Katrina destroyed several houses in New Orleans.
 talakpa (adj) not tasty (also talapa)
@@ -8774,7 +8776,7 @@ Semakula = Male-given name with meaning related to gains [Se maku la = Pulled th
 LOST IN TRANSLATION (Lugbara AI):
-This encyclopedic research documentation is inspired by (and dedicated to) Cynthia Letasi, aka Rejoice (The Beautyful One born on Thursday 17th August 1995 [Roger that Ayi Kwei Armah] and Green Riding Hood [Now Mrs. Mungufeni whose husband I was a fan of after his song "DJ Pastor" before she proclaimed that they were dating]). She 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, but inversely over four years ahead in speaking the language of the land we dwelt on. If a snake, Balaam's donkey, ants, Beast in the Book of Revelation and parrots can talk, then how about stones which JESUS said can praise GOD with loud voices if we don't? This pre-teen Lugbara glitter-girl drained Amalala ga kibuga [Luganda for: City haughtiness] out of me. To be honest, she was my first "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 like a homie through kind, unapologetic treatment because I loved her smile, hawking eyes and presence until she confessed something unexpected, but very stunning that I will treasure until infinity). Cynthia engraved her fingerprints in my heart. Everytime I left Arua for campus in Mukono, I would feel my heart pain uncomfortably around Madi Okollo (found it hard to breathe), but calm down in Nebbi Town. Her lookalikes included the volatile Tonto Dikeh (Nigerian I watched on Top TV in KLA), lyric-savvy Sheebah Karungi who broke out around 2009, decent Betty Mpologoma, unflinching Victoria Bagaya on NBS, worry-free plus bold Spice Diana (UG's Biggest Celebrity in 2024) as well as the easygoing Scarlett Johansson who automatically became my all-time favourites; I knew CL 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 Jommie Nankya (Bukedde TV), 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. Aka ma agi ne ra, ma ovu ayikosi [When I see my friend, am happy]. I smiled like GOD's sun was shining brightly on me that 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: Rise and shine! Disconnection is re-direction; too much love will heal you. JESUS said: Love your neighbour as you love yourself; I loved my neighbour's daughter as I loved myself. Love is indestructible and the Greatest Thing: I admired Cynthia's pleasant appearance and shameless, supadupa fluency at a very tender age of 6 to 11 plus felt inspired to polish my own linguistics by reading Lugbara afresh since I learnt my mother tongue in Busoga (Birth to 11 years) and Buganda only by listening to Lugbara people talk despite being downgraded as backward or Lower class (Not Upper). Depression Management (Edification/ Elevation): Detach your mind and heart (Subconscious) from negative criticism, abuse, belittlement, mockery, disrespect, pressure, discrimination, pokopoko or contempt! Even though I spoke and understood the language, I couldn't transcribe Lugbara well like English but when moonstruck by our Mt. Wati Road (Arua) neighbour's adorable goldskinned daughter, I was motivated to re-study this vernacular from Northwestern Uganda in black and white (scraping from music lyrics, Bibilia, 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 (Munyankole studying Business Administration) also hired me after campus to do artwork in Lugbara for him and Jolynn Investments Limited - One Nation under GOD], exclusively English dictionaries, a Chinese Dictionary for finding word classes, Google web searches for synonyms plus asked various people including my Parents and Facebook friends like Okitembeki Ndengendu [Enoch Opika Diku], 2012 Kyambogo University dissertation entitled "A History of the Logbari Clans of West Nile 1000-1925 AD" by Fr. Lazarus Ijoyi from Ofude [Maraca], 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, the Grasshopper Translation Machine), Ojapi Converter (Bypassing the Language Barrier) dedicated to the kind and GODfearing Stella Mayokia who I worked with in 2010 or African Chinese. 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 half of the 2000s; I decided to create my own Lugbara Culture blog (Amazing World of Lugbara) plus Facebook groups with the data around 2008, a process that inspired this vocabulary-book 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. Additionally, I 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 their 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. Fountain Publishers has Lugbarati Buku Anzini for Secondary School children, approved by Ministry of Education and Sports (MoES) plus National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC) in Kyambogo. 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 Ndezo Dramani) to me, though my Mother departed in Twenty22 (during Volume 7) - She used to tell me: If you cannot express something in Lugbara, then use English! My father meanwhile said translation is difficult sometimes and I should be out with people to learn more, but still helped me find words quite well. Some relatives and natives would laugh at my pronunciations or choice of words but it didn't phase me. Teachers beat learners for speaking vernacular at school, but I didn't fear; spoke it privately and luckily remained untouchable. Why do Africans despise themselves yet they are 99.9 percent the same? In Bantuland, I was never ashamed to be called Omulugwara even if it was a contemptuous byword for stupidity, Naked People (Only Karamoja was ranked before us and dismissed as merely a desert plus game park), backwardness, thieves (pickpockets), street vendors with baskets on the head selling seeds eg groundnuts or fruits like mangoes, mairunji-eaters, security guards, toilet cleaners or emptors, etc. At least, we are not beggars, but educated, energetic, welcoming, hardworking Ugandans who remain natural (Without artificial bodyparts like nyash nor eyelashes), faithful in marriage, kind and loving. Some Lugbara are soldiers (like President Idi Amin who was half Lugbara), doctors (eg Okuga in Jinja and Kingi in Namuwongo), lawyers (eg Caleb Alaka, Emmanuel Candia and others), bankers, professors, clergy, managers or CEOs and wealthy people (GOD provides). From Arua Park in KLA to Arua Park in Bugerere, you can find Lugbara people everywhere. 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 or another related language. Also, Aringa is like Lugbara Patois, Pidgin or Lugba-Filipino. During May 2023, someone asked me why I "study Lugbara yet it is not useful" and I told him not to belittle my mother tongue like that; garbage or waste appears worthless until it's recycled and given value or repackaged like brickets or beads, biogas, etc: 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 about six 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, more than Lingala or even English; many place names in Orientale Province as spotted on Google Maps look like Lugbara words). #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, Masakhane (We Build Together) African Language NLP, Translators Without Borders (TWB), Artificial Intelligence for Development-Africa Network (AI4D-Africa), Hugging Face, Deep Site, Foundation for Lugbarati Development Initiative (FLUDI), Quantum ML or Lugbara GPT type-of-way. Live translation of President M7's speeches (by people like Nahori Oya, Fred Bada, John Ondoma, etc), social media broadcasts (eg Getrude Abiria [Oku aka], Peace Victoria Eyotaru, X. Pillo Hilarious who resembles Ham Jay animations, Baby Girl, Scorpionbae, Otelul, Simpoh, MC Ricky, etc) plus other arrangements such as crusades, conferences, weddings, funerals and so on can also be a reference. Your vibe attracts your tribe... 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); every challenge forces you to think of ways to sidestep (jump off/ bypass or leap over) it...
 When I was in Senior 5 (during 2001), I told my hostelmates that one day there will be a radio device that transcribes 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 like during refreshing History lessons at SMACK and using BBC Live 5 Arsenal commentary. In Senior 6, GOD made the woman I loved the most at Makerere College School [named Lydia (Muganda)] to sit immediately infront of me; her back rested against the front of my wooden desk and sometimes when she skipped what was being dictated, she would turn around to fill missing words in her classwork book using my notes. That was truly heartwarming because I regarded her a "perfect woman", but played it safe simply because I believed competition was high (Just enjoyed the moments she gave me; told me she landed for my Art and thought of me as a gentleman)! When I joined UCU the following year, I actually fell in love with another woman [Alice (Mukonzo)] because she reminded me of my old classmate: Stout plus graceful in gait, but a Gooner like me unlike the Muganda who was a Kopite Red. I was labelled "Mulalu [Luganda for: Madman]" for mentioning the radio-text display 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... 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 electronic 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. The Google.com AI Mode can fish out Lugbara words from throughout the internet and explain to you (Some are hallucinations, but others are spot-on especially when it scrapes from bible translations). Self-Adapting or Adjusting LLMs (SEAL or SALMs) will learn new words by themselves. Teach AI to fish and it will fish all the fish-species to extinction... Push to the limits: 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... United Nations (UN) media calls the language Logbari. 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 LB or Lbr (which is actually my Lugbara Dictionary logo in a circle; it corresponds better though already taken by Lohorung language which is an endangered Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Nepal). The quick, brown fox jumps over the lazy dog!

 Maliko (n) female-given name meaning "The mother's nominal husband and family has nothing to offer her parents" or simply "No wealth"
+MALUCUFO (abbr) Madi-Lugbara Cultural Foundation (pronounced MALUCHUFO)
 Malunga (n) male-given name meaning "Let them look/ see!"
 Maye! (interj) Oh my, Oh no, I'm sorry! (Bambi in Luganda)
+Mayokia (n) female-given name meaning "Let them say" eg Mayokia ni imbapi. = Mayokia is a teacher.
+mayuni (n) yam (also ayu, gurunya, girinya, likinya) eg Sitela ni mayuni le. = Stella is like a yam.
 maza (adj) rotten, decayed
 meteni (n) methane gas
+meya (n) mayor eg Zohurani Mamudani ni Nu Yoku Siti ma meya. = Zohran Mamdani is New York City's mayor.
 mgbemgbe (n) irish potatoes (also ayirisi)
 ntula (n) green berries
+Nu Yoku (n) New York, the Big Apple
+Nu Zilandi (n) New Zealand
 Nubi (adj, n) Nubian tribe
 Nubiti (n) Kinubi, Nubian language
 nyu (v) wither, wilt
 nyure (n) cow vaseline mixed with plant oil and smeared on skin
 nyuta (n) withering, wilting
 nzuta (n) run, running, athletics, sucking, drying (also nzuza) eg Akibua ma ru ku nzuta si. = Akiibua's name became popular because of athletics.
+Oo [shares some words with Uu especially in Aringa dialect]
 oa (v) stay, reside (also aa, archaic o'a, o-a) eg Purisika ni oa "Above The Low" vu Mvara-a. = Prisca stays near Above The Low in Mvara.
 oata (n) stay (also oaza)
 pilawo (n) rice cooked with small chops of meat as a recipe (also pilau) eg Tomu ni pilawo nya Dereva ma Kona-a. = Tom is eating pilau at Drivers' Corner.
+pilili (adj, n) naked, undressed (also pililiru) eg Oku yi aci pilili Nu Besiti Hoteli Busega-a. = Women walk naked in New Best Hotel Busega.
 pilipili (n) red pepper (also piripiri)
 Ragemu Bici (n) canopied rivershed with meanders on River Enyau about 3 kilometres south of Arua City, half a kilometre from CEFORD Arua eg Bobu nya mukati towi azini i'bi iri Ragemu Bici-a. = Bob ate five loaves of bread and two fish at Ragem Beach.
+ragibi (n) rugby eg Nu Zilandi "All Blacks" ndeki Sipiringbokisi Ragibi-a. = New Zealand All Blacks beat Springboks in rugby.
 rakaka (adv) (do sth) first, in advance (also raka) eg Mi ofe rakaka! = (You) first pay!
 tajiri (n) rich person
+tala (n) lamp; side, hurricane eg Tala Katrina eza jo karakara Nu Olinizi-a. = Hurricane Katrina destroyed several houses in New Orleans.
 talakpa (adj) not tasty (also talapa)
 LOST IN TRANSLATION (Lugbara AI):
+This encyclopedic research documentation is inspired by (and dedicated to) Cynthia Letasi, aka Rejoice (The Beautyful One born on Thursday 17th August 1995 [Roger that Ayi Kwei Armah] and Green Riding Hood [Now Mrs. Mungufeni whose husband I was a fan of after his song "DJ Pastor" before she proclaimed that they were dating]). She 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, but inversely over four years ahead in speaking the language of the land we dwelt on. If a snake, Balaam's donkey, ants, Beast in the Book of Revelation and parrots can talk, then how about stones which JESUS said can praise GOD with loud voices if we don't? This pre-teen Lugbara glitter-girl drained Amalala ga kibuga [Luganda for: City haughtiness] out of me. To be honest, she was my first "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 like a homie through kind, unapologetic treatment because I loved her smile, hawking eyes and presence until she confessed something unexpected, but very stunning that I will treasure until infinity). Cynthia engraved her fingerprints in my heart. Everytime I left Arua for campus in Mukono, I would feel my heart pain uncomfortably around Madi Okollo (found it hard to breathe), but calm down in Nebbi Town. Her lookalikes included the volatile Tonto Dikeh (Nigerian I watched on Top TV in KLA), lyric-savvy Sheebah Karungi who broke out around 2009, decent Betty Mpologoma, unflinching Victoria Bagaya on NBS, worry-free plus bold Spice Diana (UG's Biggest Celebrity in 2024) as well as the easygoing Scarlett Johansson who automatically became my all-time favourites; I knew CL 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 Jommie Nankya (Bukedde TV), 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. Aka ma agi ne ra, ma ovu ayikosi [When I see my friend, am happy]. I smiled like GOD's sun was shining brightly on me that 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: Rise and shine! Disconnection is re-direction; too much love will heal you. JESUS said: Love your neighbour as you love yourself; I loved my neighbour's daughter as I loved myself. Love is indestructible and the Greatest Thing: I admired Cynthia's pleasant appearance and shameless, supadupa fluency at a very tender age of 6 to 11 plus felt inspired to polish my own linguistics by reading Lugbara afresh since I learnt my mother tongue in Busoga (Birth to 11 years) and Buganda only by listening to Lugbara people talk despite being downgraded as backward or Lower class (Not Upper). Depression Management (Edification/ Elevation): Detach your mind and heart (Subconscious) from negative criticism, abuse, belittlement, mockery, disrespect, pressure, discrimination, pokopoko or contempt! Even though I spoke and understood the language, I couldn't transcribe Lugbara well like English but when moonstruck by our Mt. Wati Road (Arua) neighbour's adorable goldskinned daughter, I was motivated to re-study this vernacular from Northwestern Uganda in black and white (scraping from music lyrics, Bibilia, 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 (Munyankole studying Business Administration) also hired me after campus to do artwork in Lugbara for him and Jolynn Investments Limited - One Nation under GOD], exclusively English dictionaries, a Chinese Dictionary for finding word classes, Google web searches for synonyms plus asked various people including my Parents and Facebook friends like Okitembeki Ndengendu [Enoch Opika Diku], 2012 Kyambogo University dissertation entitled "A History of the Logbari Clans of West Nile 1000-1925 AD" by Fr. Lazarus Ijoyi from Ofude [Maraca], 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, the Grasshopper Translation Machine), Ojapi Converter (Bypassing the Language Barrier) dedicated to the kind and freespirited Stella Mayokia who I worked with for Electoral Commission in 2010 or African Chinese. 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 half of the 2000s; I decided to create my own Lugbara Culture blog (Amazing World of Lugbara) plus Facebook groups with the data around 2008, a process that inspired this vocabulary-book 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. Additionally, I 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 their 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. Fountain Publishers has Lugbarati Buku Anzini for Secondary School children, approved by Ministry of Education and Sports (MoES) plus National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC) in Kyambogo. 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 Ndezo Dramani) to me, though my Mother departed in Twenty22 (during Volume 7) - She used to tell me: If you cannot express something in Lugbara, then use English! My father meanwhile said translation is difficult sometimes and I should be out with people to learn more, but still helped me find words quite well. Some relatives and natives would laugh at my pronunciations or choice of words but it didn't phase me. Teachers beat learners for speaking vernacular at school, but I didn't fear; spoke it privately and luckily remained untouchable. Why do Africans despise themselves yet they are 99.9 percent the same? In Bantuland, I was never ashamed to be called Omulugwara even if it was a contemptuous byword for stupidity, Naked People (Only Karamoja was ranked before us and dismissed as merely a desert plus game park), backwardness, thieves (pickpockets), street vendors with baskets on the head selling seeds eg groundnuts or fruits like mangoes, mairunji-eaters, security guards, toilet cleaners or emptors, etc. At least, we are not beggars, but educated, energetic, welcoming, hardworking Ugandans who remain natural (Without artificial bodyparts like nyash nor eyelashes), faithful in marriage, kind and loving. Some Lugbara are soldiers (like President Idi Amin who was half Lugbara), doctors (eg Okuga in Jinja and Kingi in Namuwongo), lawyers (eg Caleb Alaka, Emmanuel Candia and others), bankers, professors, clergy, managers or CEOs and wealthy people (GOD provides). From Arua Park in KLA to Arua Park in Bugerere, you can find Lugbara people everywhere. 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 or another related language. Also, Aringa is like Lugbara Patois, Pidgin or Lugba-Filipino. During May 2023, someone asked me why I "study Lugbara yet it is not useful" and I told him not to belittle my mother tongue like that; garbage or waste appears worthless until it's recycled and given value or repackaged like brickets or beads, biogas, etc: 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 about six 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, more than Lingala or even English; many place names in Orientale Province as spotted on Google Maps look like Lugbara words). #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, Masakhane (We Build Together) African Language NLP, Translators Without Borders (TWB), Artificial Intelligence for Development-Africa Network (AI4D-Africa), Hugging Face, Deep Site, Foundation for Lugbarati Development Initiative (FLUDI), Quantum ML or Lugbara GPT type-of-way. Live translation of President M7's speeches (by people like Nahori Oya, Fred Bada, John Ondoma, etc), social media broadcasts (eg Getrude Abiria [Oku aka], Peace Victoria Eyotaru, X. Pillo Hilarious who resembles Ham Jay animations, Baby Girl, Scorpionbae, Otelul, Simpoh, MC Ricky, etc) plus other arrangements such as crusades, conferences, weddings, funerals and so on can also be a reference. Your vibe attracts your tribe... 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); every challenge forces you to think of ways to sidestep (jump off/ bypass or leap over) it...
 When I was in Senior 5 (during 2001), I told my hostelmates that one day there will be a radio device that transcribes 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 like during refreshing History lessons at SMACK and using BBC Live 5 Arsenal commentary. In Senior 6, GOD made the woman I loved the most at Makerere College School [named Lydia (Muganda)] to sit immediately infront of me; her back rested against the front of my wooden desk and sometimes when she skipped what was being dictated, she would turn around to fill missing words in her classwork book using my notes. That was truly heartwarming because I regarded her a "perfect woman", but played it safe simply because I believed competition was high (Just enjoyed the moments she gave me; told me she landed for my Art and thought of me as a gentleman)! When I joined UCU the following year, I actually fell in love with another woman [Alice (Mukonzo)] because she reminded me of my old classmate: Stout plus graceful in gait, but a Gooner like me unlike the Muganda who was a Kopite Red. I was labelled "Mulalu [Luganda for: Madman]" for mentioning the radio-text display 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... 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 electronic 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. The Google.com AI Mode can fish out Lugbara words from throughout the internet and explain to you (Some are hallucinations, but others are spot-on especially when it scrapes from bible translations). Self-Adapting or Adjusting LLMs (SEAL or SALMs) will learn new words by themselves. Teach AI to fish and it will fish all the fish-species to extinction... Push to the limits: 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... United Nations (UN) media calls the language Logbari. 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 LB or Lbr (which is actually my Lugbara Dictionary logo in a circle; it corresponds better though already taken by Lohorung language which is an endangered Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Nepal). The quick, brown fox jumps over the lazy dog!