Swahili lesson

My affinity for languages continues.

I'm not going to pretend I've absorbed a whole lot of Swahili since I've been here, but my twice-a-week lessons are definitely helping and I've gained an appreciation for the general structure of the language.

• First, compared with Chinese: No tones, no characters = so much easier! But somehow this does make the language lose a bit of its personality. Example: The word for "tomorrow" in Swahili is "kesho." I'm pretty sure it has a nice history - rooted in Bantu? - but aside from that it means exactly the same thing as "tomorrow". In Chinese, tomorrow is 明天, or míngtiān in pinyin. The character 明 is actually made up of two characters, sun and moon, and by itself it means "bright." 天 means "day" but can also mean "heaven" and "sky" a slew of other things. So yes, the day after today is a pretty simple translation, but in Chinese the character component gives it additional underlying implications. Tomorrow is a bright day.

• Names are quite formulaic here. I'm not exactly clear on how it works, but a portion of each name is a time word indicating when the person was born. One of our field staff gave me the name "Nafula" (which gets a good laugh when I introduce myself, as it's a standard Bukusu name and I am not a standard Bukusu) which is the name given to girls born in the rainy season. Apparently it also means "fertile". Makes sense?

• Greetings here are not for the impatient. (Or maybe Africa is just not a good place for the impatient...?) Conversations generally begin with a handshake and "habari"? (How are you?) The response is "mzuri" (good) - even if you are bad; you can address that later. Swahili books will tell you "nzuri" but apparently Western Kenya does its own thing. From there, you ask "habari za..." followed by any noun. (How are the kids? How is work? How is the morning? How is the day?) These greetings are often translated directly into English for conversations with mzungu, which is actually quite charming. It's pretty rare to get such interest in your well-being from strangers in the US!
  

Side: This also explains why in China, people yell "HALLO" at foreigners, while here it's "HOW-ARE-YOU!" - sometimes strung directly in as "How-are-you-I'm-fine!" Just a direct translation of what they'd be yelling in their native tongues.

• Grammar. Woo hoo! This part will be brief. Subject clauses are sort of jammed all together into one word. For example, "I am going" is ninaenda: ni is the prefix for first person speech, na indicates present tense, and enda is the verb root that means "to go". You will go, similarly, is utaenda. Can you guess what "u" and "ta" mean....? Nouns are pluralized by changing the prefix, also. Mzungu is what people yell when I run alone; wazungu is the shout when I'm running with the (white) guys.
  

Well now that I've gotten the language post out of my system: if you want more, I'll be more than happy to give you lessons at home. And for those of you who can't believe you just voluntarily took a mini Swahili lesson, I promise to make my next entry about something a little less school-like.