12/29/2019 Swahili To English
Swahili is the most widely spoken language in sub-Saharan Africa, and acts as the lingua franca for most of East Africa (although it's not the first language of many people). In Kenya and Tanzania, Swahili shares the title of official language with English and primary school children are usually taught in Swahili.Many Ugandans understand some Swahili, although it's rarely spoken outside of the. Kamusi is managed by Dr. Martin Benjamin, Executive Director. 'Kamusi (Swahili for 'dictionary') began in 1994 because I needed a good Swahili dictionary to do anthropology research in Tanzania. I couldn't write one by myself, so developed one of the first crowdsourcing projects for people to contribute online.
Swahili, also known as Kiswahili (translation: language of the Swahili people), is a Bantu language and the first language of the Swahili people. It is a lingua franca of the African Great Lakes region and other parts of eastern and south-eastern Africa, including Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).[6]Comorian, spoken in the Comoros Islands is sometimes considered to be a dialect of Swahili, though other authorities consider it a distinct language.[7]
The exact number of Swahili speakers, be it native or second-language speakers, is unknown and a matter of debate. Various estimates have been put forward and they vary widely, ranging from 50 million to 100 million.[8] Swahili serves as a national language of the DRC, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. Shikomor, the official language in Comoros and also spoken in Mayotte (Shimaore), is related to Swahili.[9] Swahili is also one of the working languages of the African Union and officially recognised as a lingua franca of the East African Community.[10] In 2018South Africa legalized the teaching of Swahili in South African schools as an optional subject to begin in 2020.[11]
A significant fraction of Swahili vocabulary derives from Arabic,[12] in part conveyed by Arabic-speaking Muslim inhabitants. For example, the Swahili word for 'book' is kitabu, traceable back to the Arabic word ÙتابkitÄb (from the rootk-t-b 'write'). However, the Swahili plural form of this word ('books') is vitabu, rather than the Arabic plural form Ùتبkutub, following the Bantu grammar in which ki- is reanalysed as a nominal class prefix, whose plural is vi-.[13]
Classification[edit]
Swahili is a Bantu language of the Sabaki branch.[14] In Guthrie's geographic classification, Swahili is in Bantu zone G, whereas the other Sabaki languages are in zone E70, commonly under the name Nyika. Local folk-theories of the language have often considered Swahili to be a mixed language because of its many loan words from Arabic, and the fact that Swahili people have historically been Muslims. However, historical linguists do not consider the Arabic influence on Swahili to be significant enough to classify it as a mixed language, since Arabic influence is limited to lexical items, most of which have only been borrowed after 1500, while the grammatical and syntactic structure of the language is typically Bantu.[15][16]
History[edit]
Swahili in Arabic scriptâmemorial plate at the Askari Monument, Dar es Salaam (1927)
Origin[edit]
Its old name was Kingozi, but as traders came from Arab countries, their vocabulary intermingled with the language. It was originally written in Arabic script.[17]
The earliest known documents written in Swahili are letters written in Kilwa in 1711 in the Arabic script that were sent to the Portuguese of Mozambique and their local allies. The original letters are preserved in the Historical Archives of Goa, India.[18]
Its name comes from Arabic: سÙاØÙÙ sÄħil = 'coast', broken plural سÙÙÙاØÙÙ sawÄħil = 'coasts', سÙÙÙاØÙÙÙÙÙ sawÄħilï = 'of coasts'.
Colonial period[edit]
Although originally written with the Arabic script, Swahili is now written in a Latin alphabet introduced by Christianmissionaries and colonial administrators. The text shown here is the Catholic version of the Lord's Prayer.[19]
Since Swahili was the language of commerce in East Africa, the colonial administrators wanted to standardize it.[20] In June 1928, an interterritorial conference attended by representatives of Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda, and Zanzibar took place in Mombasa. The Zanzibar dialect was chosen as standard Swahili for those areas,[21] and the standard orthography for Swahili was adopted.[22]
Current status[edit]
Swahili has become a second language spoken by tens of millions in three African Great Lakes countries (Tanzania, Kenya, and the DRC) where it is an official or national language. In 1985, with the 8â4â4 system of education, Swahili was made a compulsory subject in all Kenyan schools.[23] Swahili and closely related languages are spoken by relatively small numbers of people in Burundi, Comoros, Malawi, Mozambique, Uganda, Zambia and Rwanda.[24] The language was still understood in the southern ports of the Red Sea in the 20th century.[25][26]
Some 80 percent of approximately 62 million Tanzanians speak Swahili in addition to their first languages.[27] The five eastern provinces of the DRC are Swahili-speaking. Nearly half the 81 million Congolese reportedly speak it.[28] Swahili speakers may number 120 to 150 million in total.[29]
Swahili is among the first languages in Africa for which language technology applications have been developed. Arvi Hurskainen is one of the early developers. The applications include a spelling checker[30], part-of-speech tagging[31], a language learning software[32], an analysed Swahili text corpus of 25 million words[33], an electronic dictionary[34], and machine translation[35] between Swahili and English. The development of language technology also strengthens the position of Swahili as a modern medium of communication.[36]
Phonology[edit]
Unlike the majority of Niger-Congo languages,[37] Swahili lacks contrastive tone (pitch contour). As a result of that and the language's shallow orthography, Swahili is said to be the easiest African language for an English speaker to learn.[38]
Vowels[edit]
Standard Swahili has five vowel phonemes: /É/, /É/, /i/, /É/, and /u/. Vowels are never reduced, regardless of stress, but they are pronounced in full as follows:[39]
Consonants[edit]
Some dialects of Swahili may also have the aspirated phonemes /pÊ° tÊ° tÊÊ° kÊ° bÊ° dÊ° dÊÊ° É¡Ê°/ though they are unmarked in Swahili's Orthography.[41] '[I]n some Arabic loans (nouns, verbs, adjectives) emphasis or intensity is expressed by reproducing the original emphatic consonants /dˤ, sˤ, tˤ, zˤ/ and the uvular /q/, or lengthening a vowel, where aspiration would be used in inherited Bantu words.'[42]
Orthography[edit]
Swahili in Arabic script on the clothes of a woman in Tanzania (ca. early 1900s)
Swahili is currently written in an alphabet close to English, except it does not use the letters Q and X.[43] There are two digraphs for native sounds, ch and sh; c is not used apart from unassimilated English loans and, occasionally, as a substitute for k in advertisements. There are also several digraphs for Arabic sounds not distinguished in pronunciation outside of traditional Swahili areas.
The language used to be written in the Arabic script. Unlike adaptations of the Arabic script for other languages, relatively little accommodation was made for Swahili. There were also differences in orthographic conventions between cities and authors and over the centuries, some quite precise but others different enough to cause difficulties with intelligibility.
/e/ and /i/, /o/ and /u/ were often conflated, but in some spellings, /e/ was distinguished from /i/ by rotating the kasra 90° and /o/ was distinguished from /u/ by writing the damma backwards.
Several Swahili consonants do not have equivalents in Arabic, and for them, often no special letters were created unlike, for example, Urdu script. Instead, the closest Arabic sound is substituted. Not only did that mean that one letter often stands for more than one sound, but also writers made different choices of which consonant to substitute. Here are some of the equivalents between Arabic Swahili and Roman Swahili:
That was the general situation, but conventions from Urdu were adopted by some authors so as to distinguish aspiration and /p/ from /b/: پھاâ /pÊ°aa/ 'gazelle', پاâ /paa/ 'roof'. Although it is not found in Standard Swahili today, there is a distinction between dental and alveolar consonants in some dialects, which is reflected in some orthographies, for example in ÙÙÙ¹Ùâ -kuta 'to meet' vs. ÙÙتÙâ -kutÌ a 'to be satisfied'. A k with the dots of y, ï®ï®ï®ï®, was used for ch in some conventions; ky being historically and even contemporaneously a more accurate transcription than Roman ch. In Mombasa, it was common to use the Arabic emphatics for Cw, for example in صÙصÙâ swiswi (standard sisi) 'we' and ÙÙØ·Ùâ kitÌ wa (standard kichwa) 'head'.
Particles such as ya, na, si, kwa, ni are joined to the following noun, and possessives such as yangu and yako are joined to the preceding noun, but verbs are written as two words, with the subject and tenseâaspectâmood morphemes separated from the object and root, as in aliyeniambia 'he who told me'.[44]
Grammar[edit]Noun classes [edit]Semantic motivation[edit]
The ki-/vi- class historically consisted of two separate genders, artefacts (Bantu class 7/8, utensils and hand tools mostly) and diminutives (Bantu class 12), which were conflated at a stage ancestral to Swahili. Examples of the former are kisu 'knife', kiti 'chair' (from mti 'tree, wood'), chombo 'vessel' (a contraction of ki-ombo). Examples of the latter are kitoto 'infant', from mtoto 'child'; kitawi 'frond', from tawi 'branch'; and chumba (ki-umba) 'room', from nyumba 'house'. It is the diminutive sense that has been furthest extended. An extension common to diminutives in many languages is approximation and resemblance (having a 'little bit' of some characteristic, like -y or -ish in English). For example, there is kijani 'green', from jani 'leaf' (compare English 'leafy'), kichaka 'bush' from chaka 'clump', and kivuli 'shadow' from uvuli 'shade'. A 'little bit' of a verb would be an instance of an action, and such instantiations (usually not very active ones) are found: kifo 'death', from the verb -fa 'to die'; kiota 'nest' from -ota 'to brood'; chakula 'food' from kula 'to eat'; kivuko 'a ford, a pass' from -vuka 'to cross'; and kilimia 'the Pleiades', from -limia 'to farm with', from its role in guiding planting. A resemblance, or being a bit like something, implies marginal status in a category, so things that are marginal examples of their class may take the ki-/vi- prefixes. One example is chura (ki-ura) 'frog', which is only half terrestrial and therefore is marginal as an animal. This extension may account for disabilities as well: kilema 'a cripple', kipofu 'a blind person', kiziwi 'a deaf person'. Finally, diminutives often denote contempt, and contempt is sometimes expressed against things that are dangerous. This might be the historical explanation for kifaru 'rhinoceros', kingugwa 'spotted hyena', and kiboko 'hippopotamus' (perhaps originally meaning 'stubby legs').
Another class with broad semantic extension is the m-/mi- class (Bantu classes 3/4). This is often called the 'tree' class, because mti, miti 'tree(s)' is the prototypical example. However, it seems to cover vital entities neither human nor typical animals: trees and other plants, such as mwitu 'forest' and mtama 'millet' (and from there, things made from plants, like mkeka 'mat'); supernatural and natural forces, such as mwezi 'moon', mlima 'mountain', mto 'river'; active things, such as moto 'fire', including active body parts (moyo 'heart', mkono 'hand, arm'); and human groups, which are vital but not themselves human, such as mji 'village', and, by analogy, mzinga 'beehive/cannon'. From the central idea of tree, which is thin, tall, and spreading, comes an extension to other long or extended things or parts of things, such as mwavuli 'umbrella', moshi 'smoke', msumari 'nail'; and from activity there even come active instantiations of verbs, such as mfuo 'metal forging', from -fua 'to forge', or mlio 'a sound', from -lia 'to make a sound'. Words may be connected to their class by more than one metaphor. For example, mkono is an active body part, and mto is an active natural force, but they are also both long and thin. Things with a trajectory, such as mpaka 'border' and mwendo 'journey', are classified with long thin things, as in many other languages with noun classes. This may be further extended to anything dealing with time, such as mwaka 'year' and perhaps mshahara 'wages'. Animals exceptional in some way and so not easily fitting in the other classes may be placed in this class.
The other classes have foundations that may at first seem similarly counterintuitive.[45] In short,
Agreement[edit]
Swahili phrases agree with nouns in a system of concord, but if the noun refers to a human, they accord with noun classes 1-2 regardless of their noun class. Verbs agree with the noun class of their subjects and objects; adjectives, prepositions and demonstratives agree with the noun class of their nouns. In Standard Swahili (Kiswahili sanifu), based on the dialect spoken in Zanzibar, the system is rather complex; however, it is drastically simplified in many local variants where Swahili is not a native language, such as in Nairobi. In non-native Swahili, concord reflects only animacy: human subjects and objects trigger a-, wa- and m-, wa- in verbal concord, while non-human subjects and objects of whatever class trigger i-, zi-. Infinitives vary between standard ku- and reduced i-.[46] ('Of' is animate wa and inanimate ya, za.)
In Standard Swahili, human subjects and objects of whatever class trigger animacy concord in a-, wa- and m-, wa-, and non-human subjects and objects trigger a variety of gender-concord prefixes.
Dialects and closely related languages[edit]
This list is based on Swahili and Sabaki: a linguistic history.
Dialects[edit]
Modern standard Swahili is based on Kiunguja, the dialect spoken in Zanzibar Town, but there are numerous dialects of Swahili, some of which are mutually unintelligible, such as the following:[47]
Old dialects[edit]
Maho (2009) considers these to be distinct languages:
The rest of the dialects are divided by him into two groups:
Maho includes the various Comorian dialects as a third group. Most other authorities consider Comorian to be a Sabaki language, distinct from Swahili.[48]
Other regions[edit]
In Somalia, where the AfroasiaticSomali language predominates, a variant of Swahili referred to as Chimwiini (also known as Chimbalazi) is spoken along the Benadir coast by the Bravanese people.[49] Another Swahili dialect known as Kibajuni also serves as the mother tongue of the Bajuni minority ethnic group, which lives in the tiny Bajuni Islands as well as the southern Kismayo region.[49][50]
In Oman, there are an estimated 22,000 people who speak Swahili.[51] Most are descendants of those repatriated after the fall of the Sultanate of Zanzibar.[52][53]
Swahili poets[edit]See also[edit]References[edit]
Sources[edit]
External links[edit]
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