Learning a Language-I promise this did not start as a gripe session

Ok this was a blog I was holding off on as long as possible hoping that God would answer my prayers in an overwhelming positive (for me) fashion.  But apparently He really wants me to work to learn this-Kiswahili.  I have spent hours every day working through my grammar books and dictionaries.  I have created flash cards and rewritten words I feel will be important to me to the point I have filled up two notebooks.  This is all after my time with a tutor for several weeks.

Let’s start with the history of the language.  Kiswahili is what is referred to as a Bantu language meaning that it was formed by combining several languages into a new language typically for specific types of work or trade.  In this case the Spice trade which ran through Zanzibar during pre-colonialism started the creation of Kiswahili along the coastal region of Tanzania and Kenya and was first influenced heavily by Arabic languages.  During the colonial period, Germany took control of Tanganyika (The original mainland Tanzania-at that point Zanzibar was still separate from Tanzania) they established Swahili as the official government transaction language in the country.  After Germany lost WWI and with it all of their colonial holdings, the area passed to Britain who controlled Kenya already and had started to establish Swahili there as the main language.  During these years of colonialism, the language was further influenced by both German and English languages as well as many of their trading partners like the Portuguese, Italy and Spain. 

So now we have a language which has words from many other countries that is the official language of Tanzania, however it is difficult to recognize those words in written form because they did not develop the written language portion until 1928 under British rule.  What happened was that a word like Radio in English was transformed to Redio because the “e” is the “a” sound.  Weirdly is that the “io” remained because it is pronounced “Ra-de-oh” and the “i” is the “e” sound.  It is also difficult that so many words picked up from different languages are used to represent the same thing and then another word represents 4 or 5 completely different English words.

So why do I have trouble in understanding the language?  It is in sentence forming and the fact what we would call forming a word is often forming a sentence here.  A single word can be combined with several prefixes and suffixes to form what is basically a sentence. Actually all words are formed by roots or what we normally referred to as syllables though some roots are multiple syllables.  Then these sentences I just mentioned are formed by compiling various roots. For example to say “I will write them” becomes “Nitawaandika.”  Here the “Ni” stands for “I” and the “ta” is the future tense or “will” and the “wa” is them and “kuandika” is the verb to write.  Where did the “ku” go you asked-it gets deleted in that sentence and in the majority of times you use a verb unless the verb is monosyllabic without the “ku” then it will normally stay.  Now add in that both verbs and nouns often are affixed with prefixes and suffixes to let you know who, what, when, where type things and they have to be match up but say a personal pronoun for me is “-angu” and the verb prefix is “ni-“ and it is the same for the verb prefix object.  That is not always the case as in the singular form of you the possessive pronoun is “-ake” the verb prefix is “a-“ or “yu-“ and the verb prefix for an object is “-m(w)-“ and yes they have a plural form of you or as we southerner’s say y’all. 

Not all prefixes and suffixes are simply to say who what when etc.  For example William asked if I was awake via text one morning by saying “umeamkaje” so I started by stripping off the “u” and looking for the word and that did not work I tried other variations based on normal prefixes and suffixes and nothing was in my books.  Turns out you look up “ume” separate then “je” then “amka” to get “man awake how?”  Each part of the word formed a new word to make a sentence. As you can see a literal translation (word for word) often makes no sense.  So I can technically get all the words right, say them all correctly with their prefixes and suffixes but not really mean anything after they hear them.

So I spend a lot of time sifting through my three dictionaries looking for words but never really sure I am separating the prefixes and suffixes correctly to get to the base word and some dictionaries list some verbs with the “ku” and some do not.  After all that only about half the words said to me in Swahili are actually in a dictionary.  That does not even account for all the folks who are not speaking Swahili but are using local tribal dialects which are everywhere.

Another issue is that even though Swahili seems to be phonetic, it does not mean that folks here can spell or that the dictionaries have things spelled correctly.  I would say about 20% of the words I can’t find in the dictionary is because someone has spelled it wrong-either the dictionary or the person who wrote it down for me.  It helps to constantly carry index cards, a dictionary and pen and have them write it down then break it apart to find what you think they said.

Now there is the fun of trying to find words to describe technical objects especially those that are newer.  For example I spent days trying to find the Swahili word for a solar charge controller.  I looked up each word separately and tried to use them that way and then combine them in different ways.  When I finally got someone to let me go through their shop to find what I was looking for they use the same spelling just pronounce it with their vowel sounds so it is a “Chah-rga  Co-ntro-llar” 

For the Lord of the Rings Fans I have the next issue: 

You must understand, young Hobbit, it takes a long time to say anything in Old Entish. And we never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say.--Treebeard

Despite the use of a word as a sentence, simple concepts take a lot of words and sentences to convey them. 

Now the fun of finding out what something costs.  I have found that a majority of folks in the more rural areas never learned to count properly over 100.  So I ask how much something costs and hear “Elfu tatu kumi tano.”  What that says is three thousand ten five.  What they meant to say was “Elfu Kumi na tatu na mia tano” which is 13,500 Shillings.  However they could also have meant to say “Elfu thelathini na tano” which would have been 35,000 Shillings where they though saying Kumi was a multiplier after the tatu.

Now my last big gripe and this goes to most languages I have found.  Why do they make the names of certain body parts that you should not talk about so close in pronunciation to commonly used words?  For example a certain female body part that should not be mentioned is one vowel sound off from Kumi for 10.  Shouldn’t those words be in a special pronunciation category or something.

So for a logic based brain like mine this has been difficult to learn.  For those of you smirking right now because you are good at languages and you have no idea why I am struggling let me remind you of my native language:

Q=(A*(1.486/n)*R⅔)*S½  Manning’s Flow Equation for a full pipe

The life cycle cost analysis of a plastic rainwater harvesting tank versus a concrete one over 30 years.

Calculating the distance across the river while water is flowing using only a compass.