Crossword clues for ngai
ngai
Wikipedia
Ngai (Engai, Enkai, Mweai, Mwiai) is the Supreme God in the religions of the Kamba and Kikuyu of Kenya. He lives on the holy mountain Kirinyaga ( Mount Kenya).
According to creation myth, the origin of humanity was fashioned by Ngai from a single tree which split into three pieces.
Ngai is the transliteration of three Chinese surnames in Hong Kong based on Cantonese:
- 魏, also common in northern China as Wei ( pinyin: Wèi)
- 危, pinyin: Wēi
- 倪, pinyin: Ní
All three characters are written the same way in both traditional and simplified writing systems.
The native pronunciation of these three characters (disregarding their tonal values) is . This causes especial difficulty to speakers of English for two reasons:
- The engma as an initial consonant is unknown in English. (However, even in modern Cantonese, the omission of initial engma is considered passable, albeit a mark of careless speech.)
- In English, the so-called "long i", which the sound ai usually represents in transliteration, represents a complementary distribution of (as in hide) and (as in height); or represents the first diphthong exclusively, depending on region. In both cases, English phonotactics call for the first diphthong in this case. However, in Cantonese the two diphthongs are distinct (in systems of Cantonese romanization the two sounds are represented by aai and ai), and the second diphthong is the appropriate one.
Therefore, individuals with these last names, when speaking English, may for convenience pronounce the last name or .
Usage examples of "ngai".
But Gikuyu, the first Kikuyu, knew that Ngai loved the earth and the seasons, and chose the digging-stick.
Then one day a Kikuyu chief gave a hyena a young goat to take as a gift to Ngai, who lived atop the holy mountain Kirinyaga.
In my hands, though, was the stick on which I had spitted the remaining meat, and I lifted this load into the air with both hands, presenting it to Ngai, Who dwells on Mount Tharaka.
She refrained, thank Ngai, from popping it into her mouth, and I took it back.
Further, in those distant days she was known by her Creator, Ngai, as the reem rather than as the rhinoceros.
She returned to Mount Tharaka and bearded Ngai in a garden of fragrant succulents.
Nevertheless, another objection took shape in her mind, and she hurried to intercept Ngai, who was busy climbing to a nest of woven twigs and colobus fur.
In his dwelling on the slope the reem found Ngai febrile and shrunken, no bigger than a dung beetle.
Mount Tharaka bereft of Ngai and saw the dust clouds billowing from the southern plains, they deduced that the reem was assisting the fugitive.
Surely, they implied, she had done beastly things to entice Ngai to bestow such lethal armament upon her.
She could hardly hope to rescue me, and, Ngai be praised, my own discomfort was minimal.
I supplicated Ngai, or whatever deity had tutelage over this ghostly dimension.
IN THE BEGINNING, Ngai lived alone atop the mountain called Kirinyaga.
To reward him for this Ngai not only taught him the secrets of the seed and the harvest, but gave him Kirinyaga, with its holy fig tree and rich lands.
Kirinyaga, and when he reached the summit, Ngai asked him what had become of the goat.