Help your fluency in a nifty way

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kanejam
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Re: Help your fluency in a nifty way

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Imralu wrote:
kanejam wrote:
Vijay wrote:« J'ai perdu l'intérêt ».
"I lost interest."
Asante! Sisemi Kipolandi - huenda ninataka 1 kukijifunza (hicho) 2 , lakini ninataka kujifunza mbele 3 lugha nyingine nyingi, kwa mfano 4 Kiswahili. 4
Thanks! I don't speak Polish - maybe I would like to, but there are many other languages I want to learn first, like Swahili.
1. I'd say ningependa here. Ninataka pretty closely matches "I want" and ningependa "I would like", except I think ninataka also has a bit of an indication of intention. The future marker -ta- is actually derived from this verb and sometimes kutaka can mean "going to".
2. Verbs can only have one object marked within them. The verb kujifunza "to learn" has an object already because the -ji- is the reflexive object marker. (Kufunza isn't used anymore, but it's basically "teach", replaced now by kufundisha.) So yeah, you can't mark what you're learning in the verb "to learn" ... you can either simply omit it or use a demonstrative, probably the medial/referential ones ending in "o", so in this case hicho.
3. I'm not sure about mbele in this sentence. It might be right, but I'd use kwanza.
4. Kwa mfano is probably not wrong, but in this context, I'd say "kama vile"
5. Also, Swahili has a similar tendency to English in shifting things around for pragmatic reasons and using relative clauses, so if you say "there are many languages I want to learn", you can say kuna lugha nyingi ninazotaka kujifunza (hizo).
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.
Imralu wrote:Leo jioni nilikwenda kwenye sherehe ya ufunguzi ya mkahawa wa mmojawapo wa rafiki zangu. Kulikuwa na chakula kingi chenye afya na wengi wa rafiki zangu walikwenda pia. Mziki iligeuza kuwa wa sauti kubwa hivyo nisiweze kusikia wengine walikuwa wakiyosema. Laiti rafiki zangu wote wangejua lugha ya alama.
Tonight I went to the opening event of a café/restaurant of one of my friends. There was a lot of healthy food and a lot of my friends went there too. The music got so loud that I wasn't able to hear what they said. I wish all of my friends could sign.
Jambo zuri! Huo ni mkahawa gani? Ninataka pia kujifunza lugha ya alama.
Sounds nice! What kind of cafe is it? I also want to learn to sign.

Kulikuwa hasara ya umeme huku, kwa hiyo sikuweza kufanya kazi kwa saa moja na nusu. Badale yake, nilikuwa katika paa.
There was a power outage here, so I couldn't work for an hour and a half. Instead, I was up on the roof.
If you cannot change your mind, are you sure you have one?

Here's a thread on Oscan.

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Re: Help your fluency in a nifty way

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linguoboy wrote:Die Schuld dafür gebe ich am allermeisten den Mann'schen Werken.
It is the works of the Mann family which I chiefly fault.
jal wrote:Ja również chcę uczyć się polskiego, ale nie mam czasu...
I also want to learn Polish, but I don't have the time...
Vijay wrote:Bossa Nova
Linguoboy żyje w 19-m wieku, Vijaj w latach 60-ych - wzsystcy żyją w przeszłym!
Linguoboy vit dans le 19-e siècle, Vijay dans les années '60 - chacun vit dans le passé!
Linguoboy leeft in het 19-e eeuw, Vijay en de jaren 60 - iedereen leeft in het verleden!

Linguoboy is living in the 19th century, Vijay in the 60s - everybody is living in the past!

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Re: Help your fluency in a nifty way

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Aber doch am Fin de Siècle!
But at the fin de siècle!

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Re: Help your fluency in a nifty way

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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.
Jambo zuri! Huo ni mkahawa gani? Ninataka pia kujifunza lugha ya alama.
Sounds nice! What kind of cafe is it? I also want to learn to sign.
Hapa ni tovuti ya Facebook ya mkahawa. Mimi ninachukia neno "superfood", lakini nadhani kwamba mkahawa huu unafaa Berlin kabisa. Tulikula wali ulio na nyoga shiitake, bisi zilizo na taimu, mipira ya viazi vitamu iliyo na mchuzi fulani, samoni iliyo juu ya mikate midogo sana na kadhalika.
Here is the link to the Facebook site of the café. Personally, I hate the word "superfood", but I think this café fits Berlin perfectly. We ate rice with shiitake mushrooms, popcorn with thyme, sweet potato balls with some kind of sauce, salmon on very small pieces of bread and stuff like that.

Lugha za alama (pia: lugha za ishara) zinafurahisha sana!
Sign languages are a lot of fun!
Kulikuwa na 1 hasara ya umeme 2 huku, kwa hiyo sikuweza kufanya kazi kwa saa moja na nusu. Badala yake, nilikuwa juu ya 3 paa.
There was a power outage here, so I couldn't work for an hour and a half. Instead, I was up on the roof.
1. Kuwa is just "be", kuwa na is "have" and with the locative classes ku-, pa- or m- as the subject can be used for existence. (Kuna, kulikuwa na, kutakuwa na ...). If you just say kulikuwa it means "the area around here was a power outage". I have a feeling you know this and just forgot the na though.
2. I couldn't find hasara ya umeme. That just means "loss of electricity", which is clear enough, but I actually found it with the verb -katika (mediopassive form of -kata "to cut", so basically "to cut out"). You could use it as a noun and say Kulikuwa na kukatika kwa umeme huku, but I think if you're going to use the verb, you may as well just use it as a verb and say umeme ulikatika huku and I find examples of that.
3. I think katika kind of really implies that you're in the roof. It's not as strongly insidey as ndani ya but it's still pretty inny. It's related to kati ya "between" and katikati ya "in the middle of" and may either be a shortening of the latter, or one of the last traces of class 12: kati ka. I think you could probably say kwenye because that basically just turns it locative (or you could say paani I guess, but I don't think it's common), but I think juu ya is much clearer, especially since you said "up on" in English. Roughly:

katika paa = in the roof (into ... / out of ...)
ndani ya paa = inside the roof (inside ... / out from inside ...)
kwenye paa = at the roof (to ... / from ...)
juu ya paa = on the roof / on top of the roof (onto ... / off ...)

Ulikuwa kazini au nyumbani?
Were you at work or at home?
hwhatting wrote:Linguoboy leeft in het 19-e eeuw, Vijay en de jaren 60 - iedereen leeft in het verleden![/b]
Linguoboy is living in the 19th century, Vijay in the 60s - everybody is living in the past!
Wewe unaishi wakati gani?
What time are you living in?

Jana niliwatembelea rafiki na, nikicheza na paka wao, alinikwaruza kiwikoni, hivyo inaonekana kana kwamba nilijifanyia kama nilipokuwa kijana. Paka huo ni mpumbavu!
Yesterday, I visited some friends and while I was playing with their cat, he scratched me so that it looks like I did it to myself like when I was a teenager. That cat's an idiot!
Glossing Abbreviations: COMP = comparative, C = complementiser, ACS / ICS = accessible / inaccessible, GDV = gerundive, SPEC / NSPC = specific / non-specific
________
MY MUSIC

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Re: Help your fluency in a nifty way

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hwhatting wrote:
jal wrote:Ja również chcę uczyć się polskiego, ale nie mam czasu...
Dziękuję bardzo!
Thanks very much!
Linguoboy leeft in het 19-e eeuw, Vijay in de jaren 60 - iedereen leeft in het verleden!
Samstag fahre ich ab nach Saarbrücken, wie jedes Jahr während Oster. Dort gibt es die Revision demo party. Ich gehe zusammen mit einem Freund. Wir fahren dieses Mahl mit seinem neuem Porsche. Ich hoffe, das wir es überleben werden.
Saturday I go to Saarbrucken, like every year during Easter. There's the Revision demo party. I go together with a friend. This time we're going with his new Porsche. I hope we'll survive.


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Re: Help your fluency in a nifty way

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jal wrote:
Linguoboy leeft in de 19-e eeuw, Vijay in de jaren 60 - iedereen leeft in het verleden!
You missed a mistake there.

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Re: Help your fluency in a nifty way

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Dē Graut Bʉr wrote:You missed a mistake there.
So I did! Appologies, and thanks for paying attention :). Also, I'd say "19e" (better: 19e), I don't think 19-e is common in Dutch writing.


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Re: Help your fluency in a nifty way

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jal wrote:Samstag fahre ich ab nach Saarbrücken, wie jedes Jahr während Oster. Dort gibt es die Revision demo party.
Was zum Teufel ist eine "Revision demo" und wieso hat das eine Party?
What the hell is a "Revision demo" and why does it get to have a party?

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Re: Help your fluency in a nifty way

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linguoboy wrote:What the hell is a "Revision demo" and why does it get to have a party?
Revision ist eine Demoparty.
Revision is a demo party.


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Re: Help your fluency in a nifty way

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jal wrote:Also, I'd say "19e" (better: 19e), I don't think 19-e is common in Dutch writing.
Agreed. I'd add that "19de" would be another option.

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Re: Help your fluency in a nifty way

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Dē Graut Bʉr wrote:Agreed. I'd add that "19de" would be another option.
Genau.
Indeed.


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Re: Help your fluency in a nifty way

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Ich wurde gezwungen, mein Hochdeutsch des 19. Jahrhunderts zu üben, da Amazon.de beim Liefern ein von mir bestelltes Buch versagt hat.
I had to give my 19th-century High German a workout because Amazon.de failed to deliver a book I ordered.

Es ist pervers befriedigend, wenn man ein Wort wie "Untätigkeit" in einem E-mail benützt.
It's perversely satisfying to use a term like "failure to act" in an e-mail.

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Re: Help your fluency in a nifty way

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Imralu wrote:(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"
That is some super interesting lexical replacement!
Imralu wrote:Angalia jinsi wanavyofanya hivyo. = Look at the way they do that. (Lit. "Look at the way how they do so.)
Very cool!
Imralu wrote:
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!!!
Thanks! Just in case you're interested, here's the other essay I wrote on Māori's passive voice.
Imralu wrote:lililolililia
What a fantastic word!
Imralu wrote:
Kulikuwa na 1 hasara ya umeme 2 huku, kwa hiyo sikuweza kufanya kazi kwa saa moja na nusu. Badala yake, nilikuwa juu ya 3 paa.
There was a power outage here, so I couldn't work for an hour and a half. Instead, I was up on the roof.
1. Kuwa is just "be", kuwa na is "have" and with the locative classes ku-, pa- or m- as the subject can be used for existence. (Kuna, kulikuwa na, kutakuwa na ...). If you just say kulikuwa it means "the area around here was a power outage". I have a feeling you know this and just forgot the na though.
2. I couldn't find hasara ya umeme. That just means "loss of electricity", which is clear enough, but I actually found it with the verb -katika (mediopassive form of -kata "to cut", so basically "to cut out"). You could use it as a noun and say Kulikuwa na kukatika kwa umeme huku, but I think if you're going to use the verb, you may as well just use it as a verb and say umeme ulikatika huku and I find examples of that.
3. I think katika kind of really implies that you're in the roof. It's not as strongly insidey as ndani ya but it's still pretty inny. It's related to kati ya "between" and katikati ya "in the middle of" and may either be a shortening of the latter, or one of the last traces of class 12: kati ka. I think you could probably say kwenye because that basically just turns it locative (or you could say paani I guess, but I don't think it's common), but I think juu ya is much clearer, especially since you said "up on" in English. Roughly:

katika paa = in the roof (into ... / out of ...)
ndani ya paa = inside the roof (inside ... / out from inside ...)
kwenye paa = at the roof (to ... / from ...)
juu ya paa = on the roof / on top of the roof (onto ... / off ...)
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.
Imralu wrote:Lugha za alama (pia: lugha za ishara) zinafurahisha sana!
Sign languages are a lot of fun!

Ulikuwa kazini au nyumbani?
Were you at work or at home?
Nilitaka kufanya kozi wa NZSL nikikaa kwenye Auckland lakini nilikuwa mvivu. Sisi, hakuna kozi ambao uko karibu.
I wanted to take an NZSL course when I lived in Auckland but I was too lazy. Now, there are no courses nearby.

Nilikuwa kazini; siwezi kwenda juu ya paa wa nyumba yangu.
I was at work; I can't get on to the roof at home.
hwhatting wrote:Linguoboy leeft in het 19-e eeuw, Vijay en de jaren 60 - iedereen leeft in het verleden!
Linguoboy is living in the 19th century, Vijay in the 60s - everybody is living in the past!
Ninaishi wakati ujao! Nipo angalau saa kumi na mbili ya mbele ya nyinyi karibu nyote.
I live in the future! I'm at least 12 hours ahead of nearly all of you.
If you cannot change your mind, are you sure you have one?

Here's a thread on Oscan.

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Re: Help your fluency in a nifty way

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hwhatting wrote:Linguoboy żyje w 19./dziewiętnastym wieku, Vijaj w latach 60./sześćdziesiątych/sześsiontych :-D - wszystcy żyją w przeszłym przeszłości!
Most people I know find adding those endings to the ordinals disgusting or at least unnecessary, and the standard is to either write just a dot or a full word.
In Budapest:
- Hey mate, are you hung-a-ry?

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Re: Help your fluency in a nifty way

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kanejam wrote: Ninaishi wakati ujao! Nipo angalau saa kumi na mbili ya mbele ya nyinyi karibu nyote.
I live in the future! I'm at least 12 hours ahead of nearly all of you.
Toutes les horloges en Nouvelle-Zélande ont tort. Autrement, vous n'avez pas compris la différence entre matin et soir.
All clocks in New Zealand are wrong. Alternatively, you guys haven't understood the difference between morning and evening.

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Re: Help your fluency in a nifty way

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Dē Graut Bʉr wrote:
kanejam wrote: Ninaishi wakati ujao! Nipo angalau saa kumi na mbili ya mbele ya nyinyi karibu nyote.
I live in the future! I'm at least 12 hours ahead of nearly all of you.
Toutes les horloges en Nouvelle-Zélande ont tort. Autrement, vous n'avez pas compris la différence entre matin et soir.
All clocks in New Zealand are wrong. Alternatively, you guys haven't understood the difference between morning and evening.
Huenda ni jua inayofanya kosa. Kwani, imesharabishia misimu yatu - michana inapoa na inafupishwa badala ya kinyume.
Maybe it's the sun that's wrong. After all, it has already messed up our seasons - the days are getting colder and shorter instead of the opposite.
If you cannot change your mind, are you sure you have one?

Here's a thread on Oscan.

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Re: Help your fluency in a nifty way

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jal wrote:Samstag fahre ich ab nach Saarbrücken, wie jedes Jahr während*1) Ostern. Dort gibt es die Revision demo party. Ich gehe zusammen mit einem Freund. Wir fahren dieses Mahl*2) mit seinem neuen Porsche. Ich hoffe, dass wir es überleben werden.
Saturday I go to Saarbrucken, like every year during Easter. There's the Revision demo party. I go together with a friend. This time we're going with his new Porsche. I hope we'll survive.
*1) Better: zu or über
*2) Mahl = "meal"
linguoboy wrote:Ich wurde gezwungen, mein Hochdeutsch des 19. Jahrhunderts zu üben, da Amazon.de beim Liefern eines von mir bestellten Buchs versagt hat.
I had to give my 19th-century High German a workout because Amazon.de failed to deliver a book I ordered.

Es ist pervers befriedigend, wenn man ein Wort wie "Untätigkeit" in einer E-mail benützt.
It's perversely satisfying to use a term like "failure to act" in an e-mail.
Imralu wrote:
hwhatting wrote: Linguoboy is living in the 19th century, Vijay in the 60s - everybody is living in the past!
What time are you living in?
Zależy od mojego nastroju.
Ça dépend de mon humeur.
Dat is van mijn stemming afhankelijk.

Depends on my mood.

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Re: Help your fluency in a nifty way

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kanejam wrote:Thanks! Just in case you're interested, here's the other essay I wrote on Māori's passive voice.
Asante sana, ndugu!
kanejam wrote: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.
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.
kanejam wrote:Nilitaka kufanya kozi ya NZSL nikikaa kwenye Auckland lakini nilikuwa mvivu. Sasa, hakuna kozi ambazo ziko karibu.
I wanted to take an NZSL course when I lived in Auckland but I was too lazy. Now, there are no courses nearby.

Nilikuwa kazini; siwezi kwenda juu ya paa la nyumba yangu.
I was at work; I can't get on to the roof at home.
- Kozi is class 9/10, so "course of" = kozi ya; courses of = kozi za. You consistently gave it agreements as if it were in class 3, 11 or 14, but in those classes, nouns will always begin with m- (class 3) or u-/w- (classes 11 and 14).
- nikikaa is fine, but it's a bit more like "living in Auckland" (with the subject "I" of course). To be more explicit that it was the past, you could say nilipokaa.
- With city names, you don't really use kwenye. You can just simply say Auckland on its own as it's already inherently locative. If you want to be clearer, the usual strategy is to put a locative classifying noun before it, eg. mjini Auckland "town-LOC Auckland" or jijini Auckland "city-LOC Auckland". I think you can use katika to emphasise "within Auckland".
I googled and for kwenye Nairobi I got 6,020 hits; mjini Nairobi got 88,500 and jijini Nairobi got 274,000 hits. Katika Nairobi gave 25,200 hits and looking at the context, it seems right to me ... searches for doctors in Nairobi etc.
- So, fixing up your agreement to kozi ambazo ziko "courses which are", it's correct, but there's a much simpler way using the relativised copula: -li-, which would give you kozi zilizo. The hard thing about relative clauses in Swa is that there are lots of different ways to do them and each have some funny restrictions ... well, the amba- ones don't, they're simple, but they're often long and clunky. At the moment I'm writing up something to help people on a Swahili-learning-teaching-sharing Discord server I'm on with their relative clauses. I can send it to you if you like ... or I can also invite you to the server.
- I'd also probably ad nami or na mimi at the end because simply saying karibu feels empty to me, but that's just my Sprachgefühl and it might not be trustworthy.
- Final funny bit: paa wa nyumba yangu means "gazelle of my house" (specifically a duiker). The roof of my house is paa la nyumba yangu. Paa is class 9/10 but animate so you'd generally use wa with it. Paa meaning roof is class 5/6 (plural: mapaa) and inanimate, so you use the class 5 la with it. And a random bit of fun ... paa wa nyumba wangu would mean "my house gazelle", although it'd be more naturally ordered paa wangu wa nyumba.

Sasa lazima nilale.
Now I have to go to sleep.
Glossing Abbreviations: COMP = comparative, C = complementiser, ACS / ICS = accessible / inaccessible, GDV = gerundive, SPEC / NSPC = specific / non-specific
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Re: Help your fluency in a nifty way

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Das Firma hat sich geirrt, indem ich bin nach Feedback über seinen "Support" gefragt worden.
The company made the mistake of asking for my feedback on their "support".

Der Tenor meiner Antwort was "Was meinen Sie 'Support'?" Vertrösten ist kein "Support"!
The thrust of my reply was, "What support?" Putting me off is not "support"!

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Re: Help your fluency in a nifty way

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linguoboy wrote:Die Firma hat den Fehler gemacht, mich nach Feedback zu ihrem "Support" zu fragen.
The company made the mistake of asking for my feedback on their "support".

Der Tenor meiner Antwort was "Was meinen Sie mit 'Support'?" Vertrösten ist kein "Support"!
The thrust of my reply was, "What support?" Putting me off is not "support"!
Czsami niemiecki bywa bliżej do angielskiego niż mógłbyś myśleć.
Sometimes German is closer to Englishm than you might think. ;-)

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Re: Help your fluency in a nifty way

Post by ˈd̪ʲɛ.gɔ kɾuˑl̪ »

hwhatting wrote:Czasami niemiecki bywa bliższy do angielskiego niż mógłbyś myśleć*.
Sometimes German is closer to Englishm than you might think. ;-)
* I don't think anyone would say this, it seems too Germanic. The most commonly heard expression is probably można by pomyśleć.
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Re: Help your fluency in a nifty way

Post by Imralu »

Oh, I missed this
kanejam wrote:Huenda ni jua linalofanya 1 kosa. Kwani, limevuruga misimu yetu - mchana 3 unapoa na unafupika 4 [kila siku] badala ya kinyume.
Maybe it's the sun that's wrong. After all, it has already messed up our seasons - the days are getting colder and shorter instead of the opposite.
1) Jua is class 5/6.
2) I couldn't find any verb -sharibishia. My guess is that it was a typo for -haribishia ... -haribisha means "ruin; spoil; bring bad luck" (causative form of -haribu "destroy, ruin, spoil", which is more or less the same meaning, so I think in this case the causative form is used as an intensive instead), and I'm not sure why you've used the applicative. The applicative is used to promote an oblique argument to object. Jua limetuharibishia misimu could work, but it would mean "the sun has ruined the seasons for us". I'd go with the verb -vuruga instead, and without the applicative.
3) As counterintuitive as it seems, mchana apparently doesn't have a plural form. It does mean "day" as opposite to "night", but I think of it more as equivalent to "daytime", without a plural. If you want to make it clear that you mean "days", you could probably add a kila siku "every day" into the sentence.
4) -fupishwa "be shortened" implies a subject. I suppose it could mean the sun ... but it seems weird to me. Instead, -fupika "grow short" would be the most natural I think. One thing that really annoys me about Swahili dictionaries is that they always use "be ..." with the mediopassive/"stative" verbs, which are generally not stative at all but inchoative. Inafupika "it is becoming short", imefupika "it has become short / it is short". I think it might also be quite good to use -pungua here "become less" rather than -fupika because I think that matches uncountable daylight more, and -pungua gets used a lot too. Because Swahili is spoken mostly around the equator, they probably don't really have any habitually used phrase for this.

One of the JW translations in the database is Winter months are cold, and the days are short. > Miezi fulani ina baridi kali sana, na siku ni fupi. which is just wrong and doesn't make sense. The siku are the 24-hour periods, which don't change. Possibly the translator was an equatorial person who took it as a metaphor, like when you feel you don't have enough time in the day, rather than as a literal shortening of the daylight hours. The next one below that seems better: He added: “In wintertime, when the day is short, I always have a period of depression.” > Aliongezea hivi: “Katika majira ya baridi kali, wakati mchana ni mfupi, mimi hufadhaika.” ... but the English also uses singular "day" there.

Jana nilipata hali ya wasiwasi wakati nilipokuwa kazini, lakini nililala vizuri na leo najihisi bora. Hata hivyo, nadhani kwamba nataka kulala tena.
I had anxiety while I was at work yesterday, but I slept well and I feel better today. Still, I think I want to sleep some more.
Glossing Abbreviations: COMP = comparative, C = complementiser, ACS / ICS = accessible / inaccessible, GDV = gerundive, SPEC / NSPC = specific / non-specific
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Re: Help your fluency in a nifty way

Post by Qwynegold »

めちゃ遅いだけど…
Mecha-osoi da kedo...
This is super late, but...
finlay wrote:同じだよ。マルディグラってフランス語だから。
Onnaji da yo. Mardi Gras-tte France-go dakara
It's the same. Mardi Gras is French for "Fat Tuesday".
やっぱり。
Yappari.
Oh, it was like that after all.
finlay wrote:日本はバレンタインをおかしくやってる。ここは、女性が彼氏だけじゃなくて、全ての男性にチョコレートをあげる日なんだ。だから先週、彼のお母さんは俺にフェレロロシェを16個くれて、嬉しかった。もう一個しか食べてない
Nihon wa valentine wo okashiku yatteru. koko wa, josei ga kareshi dake janakute, subete no dansei ni chocolate wo ageru hi nanda. Dakara senshuu, kare no okaasan wa ore ni ferero rocher wo 16-ko kurete, ureshikatta. Mou ikko shika tabetenai
They don't do valentine's right here... the girls give chocolate to all the boys, not just their boyfriends. So last week i got 16 ferrero rochers from my boyfriend's mum. So i was happy about that. I've eaten all but one. :oops:
フェレロ・ロシェ?!16個!!できないにも…
Ferero Roshe?! Jūrokko!! Dekinai ni mo...
Ferrero Rocher?! 16!! I can't even...
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Re: Help your fluency in a nifty way

Post by Qwynegold »

ところで、カネジャムさんはアガリオをする?
Tokoro de, Kanejamu-san wa Agario wo suru?
Btw, do you play agar.io Kanejam?
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Re: Help your fluency in a nifty way

Post by kanejam »

More: show
Imralu wrote: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.
That's actually very elegant - I'm very much liking the 'less nominal' uses of the noun class system.
Imralu wrote:- nikikaa is fine, but it's a bit more like "living in Auckland" (with the subject "I" of course). To be more explicit that it was the past, you could say nilipokaa.
[...]
I googled and for kwenye Nairobi I got 6,020 hits; mjini Nairobi got 88,500 and jijini Nairobi got 274,000 hits. Katika Nairobi gave 25,200 hits and looking at the context, it seems right to me ... searches for doctors in Nairobi etc.
- So, fixing up your agreement to kozi ambazo ziko "courses which are", it's correct, but there's a much simpler way using the relativised copula: -li-, which would give you kozi zilizo. The hard thing about relative clauses in Swa is that there are lots of different ways to do them and each have some funny restrictions ... well, the amba- ones don't, they're simple, but they're often long and clunky. At the moment I'm writing up something to help people on a Swahili-learning-teaching-sharing Discord server I'm on with their relative clauses. I can send it to you if you like ... or I can also invite you to the server.
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.
Imralu wrote:- Kozi is class 9/10 [...] Paa meaning roof is class 5/6 (plural: mapaa) and inanimate, so you use the class 5 la with it. And a random bit of fun ... paa wa nyumba wangu would mean "my house gazelle", although it'd be more naturally ordered paa wangu wa nyumba. [...] Jua is class 5/6.
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...
Imralu wrote:2) I couldn't find any verb -sharibishia. My guess is that it was a typo for -haribishia ... -haribisha means "ruin; spoil; bring bad luck" (causative form of -haribu "destroy, ruin, spoil", which is more or less the same meaning, so I think in this case the causative form is used as an intensive instead), and I'm not sure why you've used the applicative. The applicative is used to promote an oblique argument to object. Jua limetuharibishia misimu could work, but it would mean "the sun has ruined the seasons for us". I'd go with the verb -vuruga instead, and without the applicative.
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.
Imralu wrote:3) As counterintuitive as it seems, mchana apparently doesn't have a plural form. It does mean "day" as opposite to "night", but I think of it more as equivalent to "daytime", without a plural. If you want to make it clear that you mean "days", you could probably add a kila siku "every day" into the sentence.
[...]
He added: “In wintertime, when the day is short, I always have a period of depression.” > Aliongezea hivi: “Katika majira ya baridi kali, wakati mchana ni mfupi, mimi hufadhaika.”
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 :evil:
Qwynegold wrote:ところで、カネジャムさんはアガリオをする?
Tokoro de, Kanejamu-san wa Agario wo suru?
Btw, do you play agar.io Kanejam?
Ee, hapana... Nilicheza hiyo nyakati chache mwaka jana, lakini sikupenda sana matangazo yote ya programu ya simu. Kwa nini unauliza?
Um, no... I played a few times last year, but I really didn't like all the ads on the mobile app. Why do you ask?
If you cannot change your mind, are you sure you have one?

Here's a thread on Oscan.

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