Ki Swahili

KiSwahili is the Swahili word for Swahili. The Ki prefix is used when speaking of languages. The Wa prefix would be used for a group of people, as in Waamerika for Americans and Waingereza for the people of England. The English language is Kiingereza.

Swahili has a Bantu grammar but has been greatly influenced in its vocabulary by Arabic, to a moderate extent by Portuguese and English, with scatterings of borrowed words from German, Hindi, Farsi and many other languages.

The agglutinative nature of Swahili may be illustrated by this perfectly normal sentence:

Usiwasumbue wanapolala.

Uyou
sinot
wathem
sumbuebother (subjunctive of sumbua)

wathey
naare (doing)
powhen
lalasleep
= Don't bother them when they're sleeping.

The possibilities allowed by the rules that govern these constructions mean that borrowed words, especially verbs, fit immediately into a whole scheme that then can generate many other uses.

Somebody once did an experiment by coining a new Swahili word 'vota' meaning 'to vote'. Swahili had no specific word for this, commonly using 'chagua' which means 'choose'. The experimenter used the rules of Swahili to build a list of twenty-some words derived from 'vota'. When he read the list to African Swahili speakers, they immediately knew the meaning of most of them. The remainder they recognized when given a simple hint. So by introducing a single word 'vota', the language could generate words for voter, candidate, election, ballot, ballot box, and so on.

-- Dave Johnson davej@c-zone.net

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CategoryNaturalLanguage, AgglutinativeLanguage