My partner just bought herself a new dress, which has this phrase on it: "Mungu unilinde kama mboni ya jicho". Since my Swahili was never too good anyway and is now seriously rusty too could someone translate this for me. It seems to be something like "You are a precious thing in the eye of god"?
Thanx
My Kiswahili isn't very good either...
Mungu = God
kama = like
mboni ya jicho = apple of one's eye
I'm a bit confused about the unilinde. -linda means guard, protect, which fits nicely in the context. However, the form seems to be you (u) - me (ni) - linde (ought to guard), so it would translate as "you ought to guard me", in which case the whole phrase would be addressed to God as in "God, you should guard me like the apple of your eye".
I'm not sure, though, there are several prefixes that can mean different things in different grammatical contexts.
The phrase "apple of [one's] eye" originates in the King James version of the Bible, at Deuteronomy 32:10: "He found him in a desert land, and in the waste howling wilderness; he led him about, he instructed him, he kept him as the apple of his eye." (It also comes up in Zechariah.)
I suppose it's literal from the Hebrew; they say it means the pupil of the eye.
I have no Swahili at all but I suspect that this might be a paraphrase of the verse from Deuteronomy, "God, keep me as the apple of Your eye."