SGP's Beyond Beginner's Swahili Log

[SGP]

This is another spin-off of my main log, and this time, it is dedicated to Swahili, one of my most favorite languages.

For those who are curious whether myself spending some time on this language interferes with spending some time on another one, like Japanese: no, it doesn't do so at all, as surprising as it may seem. This is because I am learning them in rotation anyway. In addition, I have got a certain amount of Japanese energy, and a certain amount of Swahili energy. They aren't really related to each other. It is a different story with Spanish and French for some reasons, but even for those two, I give both of them a certain amount of my totally available time, so to say.

Also, I am mentally interlinking Japanese and Swahili, because they have got more in common than it seems. Both are agglutinative languages, which means that words in both of them can be rather long because they consist of several Word Building Blocks.

In this log, I plan to post any (big or small) Swahili-related progress. At the time I am opening this thread, I already speak some basic Swahili (which means in this context: it is among the languages that I am not only able to read and write). I was also already able to advance much more with it than with Japanese, which means that in the case of Kiswahili (as you call it in Swahili itself, "ki-" means something like "language of"), I already am closer to post-beginner's level. And now it may be the time to go towards the goal of reaching the intermediate level at least.

That was a warm-up.

Now starting by reviewing something I already read in the past:

- The difference between "open" and "close" is a single letter only.

funga mlango: close the door (you, singlar)
fungua mlango: open the door (you, singular)

So "-funga" is the verb stem of "to close". And this "-a-" suffix reverses the meaning.

- "njoo" is one of the few irregular imperative verbs I ever have read about. It means "come" (you, singular). The stem for "to come" is "-kuja". If anybody of you knows why this rare irregularity occured, I'd be interested in hearing it.

- One of the things I didn't really learn much about yet are Swahili's noun classes. There is no grammatical gender like "el" and "la" in Spanish. But there is a number of noun classes (exactly/approximately ten). They are all about a number of changes to both the nouns themselves and other words surrounding them, like adjectives, demonstrative pronouns and also verbs even. But it really is a rather simple thing, it's just not something that can be learned overnight.

[SGP]

The KI/VI [KI/VI] class:

This is one of those lovely noun classes.
Now what do those "KI/VI [KI/VI]" words mean?

The first occurrence of KI/VI means that there are nouns inside this class which start with "ki-" in the singular and "vi-" in the plural.

Maybe you'd even like to re-read the above sentence while paying close attention to its wording.
It doesn't state that all nouns in this class necessarily begin that way. But only that within it, there are nouns that do so. This is because there are some others, too. Like chumba/vyumba which means room/rooms.

And the second occurrence of KI/VI (between square brackets this time) means that all verbs used for a noun of this class start with "ki-" in the singular and "vi-" in the plural. Including words like chumba/nyumba.

Some KI/VI [KI/VI] class noun examples:

- kiti/viti: chair/chairs
- chumba/vyumba: room/rooms
- some (as far as I can see) rare words that either are KI/KI or VI/VI for both singular and plural, not even mentioning them for now.

[SGP]

Possessive pronoun base suffixes:

-angu: my

-ako: your (singular)

-ake: his/her

-etu: our

-enu: your (plural)

-ao: their

But why are they "base" suffixes? Because for a full word, they are appended to something else.

The following examples are related to the word "kalamu/kalamu" (pen/pens), and all other nouns in the same class. The affixes are Y/Z, so they are "y-" for one pen and "z-" for two or more.

Examples:

kalamu yangu: my pen
kalamu zangu: my pens

kalamu yako: your (singular) pen
kalamu zako: your (singular) pens

kalamu yake: his/her pen
kalamu zake: his/her pens

kalamu yetu: our pen
kalamu zetu: our pens

kalamu yenu: your (plural) pen
kalamu zenu: your (plural) pens

kalamu yao: their pen
kalamu zao: their pens

[SGP]

Sensing a desire of Reaching the First New Swahili Progress Milestone.

Especially when it comes to this language, it currently is more of simply connecting already drawn dots to me, and less of learning something entirely new.

So what I'd like to do is to reach that first new milestone, which would mean
- a small but not insignificant increase of my "Wortschatz" ("treasure of words" literally)
- knowing some more Swahili Sentence Linking Words
- advancing at least a bit more with the noun classes, even if I still would have to simplify some things by, for example, using "... ya ..." in many cases when speaking of "... belongs to ...", while in Pure Standard Swahili, it would sometimes be "ya", sometimes "cha" or "za" or something else.

[SGP]

This log has been merged with my multi-language learning log.
This means that if there will be some futures updates,
the place I would post them would be there, not here.

The same applies to any possible replies of others to this thread.
However, in the case of a reply to this (now inactive) log,
I do intend to post a link in this thread which points to the multi-language log's new content.