kipilefti

Swahili edit

Borrowed from English keep left, from the keep left sign that appeared at the entrance.^[1]^[2]^[3]

kipilefti (ki-vi class, plural vipilefti)

^ Rory Sutherland (2014 January 4) “Why don’t Americans have kettles?”, in The Spectator‎^[1]: “Some clearly exist in Africa, since the Swahili for roundabout is kipi-lefti from the ‘Keep Left’ sign that appeared at the entrance.”
^ Welmers, William Everett (1973) African Language Structures, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, →ISBN, page 160:
In Swahili, the English instruction on a road sign has been adopted to refer to a traffic circle or roundabout; the Swahili form is /kipilefti/. By analogy with a great many nouns in which /ki-/ is a singular prefix and which have plural forms with a prefix /vi-/, the first syllable of this noun is re-analyzed as a prefix, and more than one traffic circle is, of course, /vipilefti/.
^ Petzell, Malin (2005) “Expanding the Swahili vocabulary”, in Africa & Asia‎^[2], volume 5, archived from the original on 2009-11-29, page 90 of 85-107: “A borderline case is kip(i)lefti ‘roundabout’ which comes from the English ‘keep left’. Although this cannot be said to be a pure creation, it is an illustration of innovative usage of English inasmuch as it is the definition of a concept that is used instead of its name.”