zompist bboard

Shukrani kwa ushauri!
Thanks for the help!

1. I hadn't encountered -nge- yet. Interesting that Swahili has the same alternation of 'like' and 'want' as English.
2. I didn't know that at all, but I had actually encountered kufunza in the noun mwanafunzi.
3. Looking at Glosbe, mbele seems to be more a physical before rather than temporal, so kwanza is probably the go.
4. I was guessing here a bit. Does the vi- refer to anything or is it just a set phrase? I've found kama hivi on Glosbe; does kama hivyo also exist?
5. Thanks, I wasn't feeling brave enough to attempt a relative clause but it actually doesn't look very difficult at all (unlike Māori, which I actually wrote an essay on at uni).

Corrected: Sisemi Kipolandi - huenda ningependa kujifunza hicho, lakini kuna lugha nyingine nyingi ninazotaka kujifunza kwanza, kama vile Kiswahili.

Karibu sana!


Yeah, there are a lot of things which are oddly similar to English in Swahili. The cleft sentences thing is one. This is another one. I wonder how much is due to the influence of English. "Want" and "would like" do at least make logical sense, so I can imagine it evolving independently in different languages. "Would" and "-nge-" make things hypothetical ... "Would like" is, in my mind, like saying "I would like this thing if I had it." Saying "I would want", which happens in some languages, just doesn't make a great deal of logical sense to me if the word can otherwise only really be used with something you lack. Like, I do want it, in this current timeline where I lack it ... but if I did have it, I wouldn't say "I want it" anymore ... I'd say "I like it" or "I enjoy it" or something like that. I guess some languages just use irrealis forms to add indirectness without any actual irrealis-y logic behind it.


It's actually a bit more complicated than that. From what I know of Swahili sound changes, I'm assuming it went like this: (Warning, this is just conjecture.)

(1) There was a verb -funda meaning "to learn". I don't think it's used anymore.
(2) The -y- causative gives -fund-y-a > -funza "to teach" (the causative [j] caused a bunch of consonant changes, such as /d/ to /z/).
(3) At some point, the verb -funda "to learn" started to be replaced with -ji-funza "to teach oneself".
(3) The original meaning of -funza "to teach" got weakened by this and the -ish/esh- causative form -fund-ish-a took over as "to teach"

With mwanafunzi I'm not exactly sure what happened. -i is a common nominalising suffix, especially for agent nouns. The old Bantu /i/ and /ɪ/ merged into just /i/ in Swahili, but the original /i/ caused consonant changes (such as /d/ to /z/), so there are lots of agent nouns like mwandishi "author" (from -andika "to write"), as well as another pattern that gives mwandikaji (also meaning "author"). A regular agent noun from -funda would have ended up as mfunzi, but instead its one of the mwana- words which are usually derived from NOUN+NOUN, and even though mwana on its own means son/daughter, in compounds it's more like "person". Fundi or funzi means "artisan, craftsman, technician" so ... "artisan person"? I don't know ... maybe it originally meant something more like "apprentice". Dunno. Anyway, that was my long-winded way of saying "I don't think it's directly from -funza".


Yeah, mbele ya is "in front of". Kabla ya is "before" (or, as a conjunction, kabla + negative perfect). Kwanza is pretty much "first" in most contexts it is in English. (-a kwanza when it's an ordinal number). It's from kuanza "to begin", so it's definitely got a temporal aspect to it.


Class 8, the vi- class, is often used as an adverbial class and it's pretty well entrenched in some parts of the grammar.

Unaimba vizuri. = You sing well/beautifully. (Some adverbs are formed with ki- though, and even more are formed with kwa u-, like "with -ness".)
Angalia jinsi wanavyofanya hivyo. = Look at the way they do that. (Lit. "Look at the way how they do so.)

The three different "distances" of demonstratives can be used in class 8 as words meaning "so, like this/that" etc.

Proximate: hivi "like this"
Medial: hivyo "like that" (medial ... kind of, but more like "previously mentioned")
Distal: vile "like that"

I couldn't tell you why it's kama vile and not kama hivi, but there's a bit of idiomaticity around these things. The distal ones are used as a dummy noun before a relative clause "that which ..." (eg. wale ambao wamelala "those who are sleeping"). Hivyo is also "so" in the sense of "consequently" ... (you can also say kwa hiyo or kwa hivyo). There are some ridiculous phrases like:

Hivyo ndivyo ilivyo.
hivyo ndi-vyo i-li-vyo
DEM.MED.CL8 COP.FOC-CL8 CL9-COP.REL-CL8.REL
That's the way it is.



Yeah, they're not too bad ... there are a few kinks to watch out for, but yeah, not too hard. Thanks for the link - that's incredibly fucking interesting!!!

Hili lilikuwa jambo gari langu lililolililia.
This is the thing which my car cried about.

That is some super interesting lexical replacement!


Very cool!


Thanks! Just in case you're interested, here's the other essay I wrote on Māori's passive voice.


What a fantastic word!


1. I didn't really know that but it makes perfect sense given present pana and kuna.
2. Yeah I translated literally since I couldn't find an actual translation. I didn't realise the infinitive could also be used as a verbal noun like that; the kwa in kukatika kwa umeme is the ku- form of the genitive right?
3. Juu ya paa is exactly what I wanted, not sure why I couldn't find it at all.

Asante sana, ndugu!


1.) Yeah, "have" and "be" are a bit funny in the present, but outside of the present, you can see that "have" is just "be with", and with kuna and pana, it's just saying that a place has something. BTW, usually you'd use kuna just for existence but pana for existence plus location, like if you say "there is bla bla there" or "there is bla bla in the bla bla" then pana is probably better. In your sentence, since the place you mentioned was imprecise (huku), using ku- was correct. If you had said hapa, using pa- would be correct ... although a lot of people mix the classes and have a preference for ku-.

2.) And yeah, Swahili infinitives are simply verbal nouns. They belong to class 15 and yes, kwa is the genitive preposition in class 15. (In some other Bantu languages, some body parts and some other words are also in class 15, but in Swahili and quite a few others, these have all been cleared out to reserve it for verbal nouns. For example, the word kwapa "armpit" used to be a class 15 word, but now it's been reanalysed as class 5/6 (plural makwapa). I think others have gone to other classes as well and have dropped the ku-. In any case, verbal nouns can be the subject or object of sentences too and there are even examples of them being derived into the locative classes.

Kujifunza lugha ni kugumu. = Learning a language is hard.
Cf. Ni vigumu kujifunza lugha. = It's difficult to learn a language. (The vi- is adverbial ... used because there's no other class it could relate to.)

Kuimba vizuri kunatosha. = Singing well is enough.
Kutosha kunatosha. = Being enough is enough.

When you see kwa, it's essentially the genitive of either class 15 (gerunds) or class 17 (imprecise locations) but it's hard to know which at all times. For example, when you say Niko kwa Nicole "I'm at Nicole's place", it works like chez, bei, hos and is clearly locative. When it's used as an adverbial thingo, it's probably from the class 15 use and then simply continued when the verbal noun is reverbalised.

kusoma kwa bidii = to study hard (reading of diligence)
> unasoma kwa bidii = you are studying hard

... in the first example, the kwa refers back to kusoma. In the second one, it doesn't have anything to refer back to because the verbal noun is gone ... so it's pretty easy to see how it stuck around to be an adverbial marker.

That's actually very elegant - I'm very much liking the 'less nominal' uses of the noun class system.


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.


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...


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.


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