"Ibada ya asubuhi"
Translation:Morning worship
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Etymology (ibada)
From Arabic عِبَادَة (ʿibāda).
Noun
ibada (n class, plural ibada)
1) (religion) worship
From Wiktionary:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ibada
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%B9%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%AF%D8%A9#Arabic
Further info: عِبَادَة (ʿibāda) is the verbal noun of عَبَدَ (ʿabada, "to worship"), closely related to عَبْد (ʿabd, "slave, serf; bondsman; servant of God"), and more distantly to Hebrew עֶבֶד ('éved, "a slave, a serf; a submissive") and עָבַד (avád, "to work").
This should translate to morning worship, or morning "religious" service. Please update question.
I got this wrong, and that is fine linguistically, I'm asking just for clarification but is there any difference between morning prayer and morning worship as verbs? I always thought prayer was worship and worship requires prayer. Cheers.
To my mind, the difference between the English words is that "prayer" is specifically the act of an attempt at direct personal communication with a deity, either silently (just thoughts) or also with simultaneous talking (often with a ritualistic pose, e.g. on knees, eyes closed, hands together). "Worship" is more generally any act of glorifying a deity, which includes but is not limited to prayer.
The Oxford Swahili Dictionary, the only Swa-Swa dictionary I have access to, is little help as it defines ibada with reference to -abudu and -abudu with reference to ibada. Le sigh! Circular definitions are not the only problem with this dictionary. Some "definitions" just sound like what your uncle, who has nothing to do with languages, would tell you if you asked him the meaning of a word. The definition of angalau ("at least"), for example, is pretty hilariously bad: neno litumikalo kueleza jambo lililo bora zaidi ("a word used to describe something which is better").
Wikipedia is often the best place to go to get more in depth definitions of words, so I refer you to these pages, which are also some nice reading practice. (Google translate can help out quite a bit too as it's getting better and better with Swahili.)
Thank you very much! It never occurred to me to check Wiki, even though I use it all the time for other things. Your mention of the uncle with vague definitions made me laugh, I have people like that in my life as well.
