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Yeah, I get the impression, if Swahili hadn't had so much contact with other languages that introduced conjunctions and adverbs and things like that, it'd pretty much do everything with noun classes and verbal forms. Basically all of the prepositions come from the nominal morphology, even using noun classes with the genitive for things. As examples of conjunctions, Arabic has introduced ila "except" and kabla "before", but you can also say isipokuwa "if it is not" for the former, and for the latter, you can say things like nilipokuwa sijakula "when I had not yet eaten" or nikiwa sijakula "(with me) not having eaten" for "before I ate".kanejam wrote:That's actually very elegant - I'm very much liking the 'less nominal' uses of the noun class system.
Yeah, it is a bit more complex than it might look at first glance, but I still feel like it's easier than, say, Maori.kanejam wrote:Yeah, I'm definitely beginning to see that relative clauses aren't nearly as simple as I first thought. I found this which is interesting but gives a decent glimpse into the complexity. I hadn't come across the relative copula so thought I'd stick to the safer but clunkier amba- RC.
Yeah, the good news is most noun-classes are obvious because of the prefixes. There are cases where a noun might look like it has a prefix but it's actually just the stem, like, apparently chapati, disappointingly, doesn't pluralise to vyapati ... it's class 9/10. Swahili seems to pretty freely put loanwords in the classes they look like. Kitabu is the classic example, pluralising to vitabu, but my favourites are:Looks like I just really need to sort out noun classes and not rely on my shoddy memory too much. I wish I had a house gazelle though...
kilabu "club" > vilabu "clubs" (or "vlub" )
waya "wire, cable" > nyaya "wires, cables"
There are a few instances where a prefix may look like another, especially with m-, but that can mostly be resolved semantically.
People: class 1/2, eg. mtu/watu "person/people", mwana/wana "offspring", Mwafrika/Waafrika "African/s"
Animals: class 9/10, eg. mbwa/mbwa "dog/s", mbu/mbu "mosquito/s", mwewa/mwewa "hawk/s"
Plants and etc.: class 3/4, eg. mti/miti "tree/s", mwembe/miembe "mango tree", mpaka/mipaka "border/s", moyo/mioyo "heart/s"
The only exceptions I can think of to this are:
- mnyama/wanyama "animal/s" ... literally kind of like "meat person"
mdudu/wadudu "insect, arthropod"
mjusi/mijusi "lizard/s"
mungu/miungu "god/s, deity/deities"
Anyway, if you had said paa ya nyumba, it would have been "wrong" but still definitely interpreted as "roof of the house" because that's inanimate. It was the animacy of the choice of CL1 wa rather than which decision was made between CL5 la and CL9 ya that made it really mean "duiker" ... and apparently duikers are antelopes but are NOT gazelles, which is a narrower group, so forget what I said about paa meaning "gazelle" ... gazelle is swala (or swara) and paa is "duiker" or a more generic word for any of the smaller antelopes. The word for impala is swala pala, and that pala is obviously cognate with paa and impala, but coming through a dialect or related language that didn't lose /l/ in that position. I think I want a digidigi wa nyumba ... a house dik-dik.
I can't find -ribishi anywhere :-/ Where did you come across it?It was supposed to be the verb -ribishi with the compound tense -mesha-. It's probably still wrong with the applicative though. And -vuruga looks like it means the same thing so would also work.
Yeah, there are a few of these little trip-ups in the vocabulary - words which are only singular or only plural or have an unexpected plural form for an underlying reason that's not obvious, eg. jina/majina "name/s", jicho/macho "eye/s", jino/meno "tooth/teeth". Aside from that and the recognition of noun classes that I talked about above, nouns are reasonably easy ... much easier than remembering gender, plural forms and declention in German nouns.Ah okay, that's not so much counterintuitive as just a trap for people who don't know it. I was going for 'daytime' rather than the 24 hour siku as you mention, so I'm happy with mchana. Also, seeing as they use the adjective (m)fupi, presumably -fupika is appropriate here. I will have to do some proper work to learn the verbs - so far I've just been guessing based on what I know already, and haven't looked at the stative forms at all, or the subjunctive, or the lesser used tenses... Verbs seem to be the real grammatical monsters here, they get more complicated each time I look at them
Yeah, the verbs are pretty complex, but, I don't know, I find it refreshingly simple compared to some other languages. The so-called "stative" verbs generally have a "k" in them. For example: nime(li)vunja dirisha "I broke the window", dirisha lilivunjika "the window broke", dirisha limevunjika "the window is/has broken". The subjunctive is easy: Nothing in the TAM slot, and change the final "a" if there is one to "e". If it's negative, you put -si- in the TAM slot. It's used a lot: ninataka u-end-e "I want you to go", ninataka u-si-end-e "I want you not to go". That subjunctive "e" is also used if an imperative has an object prefix (which results in slight ambiguity sometimes: nipende "love me" or "I should love/that I love"). It can also be combined with the consecutive -ka-, especially when linking two imperatives together, but also just to mean "so that ... then ..."
I glossed a story in Swahili on the CBB (which also has a video) and there's a lot of different verb tenses used (situational, consecutive, subjunctive) and things like that, so it might be interesting to you. http://aveneca.com/cbb/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=6627
I don't like games/sports. I don't like competing. I could eat 16 Ferreri Rochers faster than all of you though.