SECRET POST NUMBER THIS!

B-B-B-BONUS! Welcome to my second post in one day!

The primary purpose of this blog is to keep those of you back home in the loop. It also gives me a convenient platform for fulfilling the third of Peace Corps’ three core goals, which is to inform Americans about a foreign culture. In keeping with that goal (and, really, just because it gives me something to do), I’ll occasionally drop something here that relays some little tidbit about Tanzanian culture. This post, for example, deals with some basics on language. Here, have some Swahili…

This post will deal with the fundamentals: pronouns, the verb 'to be' (present tense only for now) and basic verb construction. Pronouns and the present tense of 'to be' are pretty straightforward; it's verb construction that can get interesting (I'll leave it up to you to decide if that's good or bad).

Here are the Swahili pronouns:

PRONOUNS
	ENGLISH	SWAHILI
Sing.	I	Mimi
	You	Wewe
	He/She	Yeye
Plur.	We	Sisi
	You (pl.)	Ninyi
	They (pl.)	Wao

Here is the present tense of the verb 'to be'; it's even simpler than the English variant.

VERB "TO BE" (PRESENT TENSE)
	ENGLISH			SWAHILI
	Pronoun	Pos.	Neg.	Pronoun	Pos.	Neg.
Sing.	I	am	am not	Mimi	ni	si
	You	are	are not	Wewe	ni	si
	He/She	is	is not	Yeye	ni	si
Plur.	We	are	are not	Sisi	ni	si
	You (pl.)	are	are not	Ninyi	ni	si
	They (pl.)	are	are not	Wao	ni	si

And then comes verb construction, which can get complex pretty quickly. I'm going to show the most basic form (subject prefix + tense + verb root) because that's primarily what we're still using.

SIMPLE VERB CONSTRUCTION
SUBJECT	SUBJECT PREFIX		TENSE MARKER		VERB ROOT
	Pos.	Neg.	Pos.	Neg.
Mimi	Ni-	Si-	-li- (past) -me- (pr. perfect) -na- (present) -ta- (future)	-ku- -ja- (-) -ta-	-itwa ("to be called") -jua ("to know") -toka ("to be from")
Wewe	U-	Hu-
Yeye	A-	Ha-
Sisi	Tu-	Hatu-
Ninyi	M-	Ham-
Wao	Wa-	Hawa-

Alrighty, so there are the charts (appreciate them; they were a pain to write). So now, using simple verb construction, you can give your name in Swahili. Because the subject is already implied in the construction, the subject pronoun is dropped:

Ni + na + itwa Kory.

I also included negatives*, which can get a little more complex (particularly in the present tense, where the tense marker is removed altogether and verb roots ending in an 'a' are modified so that they end in an 'i'). Play with negatives at your own risk.

Sijui Kiswahili.

In any case, between all the charts above (and throwing in 'Mmarekani', the term for 'American'), you should have enough to give a short introduction of yourself in Swahili.

Ninaitwa Kory. Mimi ni Mmarekani. Ninatoka Ohio.

Finally, regarding the Tanzanian vernacular: in spoken Swahili, when you are the subject speaking in the present tense, you typically drop the "Ni-" prefix. So in a conversation you would say:

Naitwa Kory. Mimi ni Mmarekani. Natoka Ohio.

There are better and more informative ways to say it, but that's enough for now considering most of you will probably never actually use this (and I'm still a newbie myself). Fun to know though, I think.

I've already got most of another Swahili-related post written (I wrote it before this, but got carried away and decided to shelve it for another time). Stay tuned.

Tutakutana siku nyingine.

*Changed the negated verb to something I'm a little more familiar with. '-itwa' (the original term) is passive form, and I have no idea if the rules change for that.