kanejam wrote:Shukrani kwa ushauri!
Thanks for the help!
Karibu sana!
1. I hadn't encountered -nge- yet. Interesting that Swahili has the same alternation of 'like' and 'want' as English.
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.
2. I didn't know that at all, but I had actually encountered kufunza in the noun mwanafunzi.
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".
3. Looking at Glosbe, mbele seems to be more a physical before rather than temporal, so kwanza is probably the go.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
- w
