So, I quite enjoyed typing up some of the Swahili of yesterday. But I figured it was unfair to throw you into it without giving you some of the basics...

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Ok. Begin lesson. Enjoy. Or suffer through. Either way.

First of all, background information – in Swahili, words tend to have all the determining factors attatched. As a language Kiswahili is phonetic, so the spelling and pronunciation isn’t too much of a challenge. It’s just the structure that takes a bit of getting used to.

Verbs have prefixes to denote the subject. There are various noun classes that group together similar types of noun and generally behave in the same way. For the M/Wa class of nouns, the prefixes are as follows:

ni – I
b – you
a – he/she
tu – we
m – you (pl.)
wa – they

Most of the other classes of nouns only have a singular (it) and a plural (they) verb prefix. I think this is because the M/Wa class deals almost entirely with nouns referring to people, whereas the others don’t.

The nouns themselves also have prefixes. In the M/Wa class, the root of the word will either be preceeded by ‘m’ if singular, or ‘wa’ if plural.

For example:
mtoto – child
watoto – children

If the noun starts with a vowel however, the prefixes change slightly. The singular prefix will be mw while the plural prefix will depend on the vowel. Wa for a words and we for words beginning with e or i.

For example:
mwana – daughter
wana – daughters

Actually my simplification of the plural vowel prefix isn’t technically correct. For words beginning with a, the wa + a forms wa etc.

There you go. That’s the only noun class I’ve learnt in a grammatical sense. I have no confidence in my ability to disect the others yet, so you’re being spared further grammar for the moment.

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The days of the week are easiest to learn in conjunction with numbers. Take the first day of the week as Saturday…

One – moja
Two – mbili
Three – tatu
Four – nne
Five – tano
Six – sita
Seven – saba
Eight – nane
Nine – tisa
Ten – kumi

Saturday - Jumamosi
Sunday - Jumapili
Monday - Jumatatu
Tuesday - Jumanne
Wednesday - Jumatano
Thursday - Alhamisi
Friday - Ijumaa

I like numbers in Swahili. They have a pleasant harmony. Look at four - eight for instance, nne – nane. And then 6/9 is sita/tisa. Neat.

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Hmmm… I have a feeling everyone but Mike may have tuned out long ago. Ah well. It’s been bugging me that I haven’t felt like I was learning enough, I just had lots of random words and limited capacity for sentence composition. But writing it out for you guys really forces me to get it clear in my head, I process the language much better this way. And I’m broadening your education. So I’m going to keep doing it every so often, and you shall just have to deal with it. I’m not forcing you to read it anyway. :-P