Uharibifu wa kifurushi ni mkubwa.

to be

Breakdown of Uharibifu wa kifurushi ni mkubwa.

• kubwa: large
• uharibifu wa kifurushi: damage to the parcel

Questions & Answers about Uharibifu wa kifurushi ni mkubwa.

How is this sentence put together grammatically?

It has a very common Swahili pattern:

• Uharibifu wa kifurushi = the damage of/to the package
• ni = is
• mkubwa = big, great, serious

So the structure is:

noun phrase + ni + adjective

In other words, it works like:

The damage to the package is serious.

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Why is it wa kifurushi?

Wa is the associative marker, often translated as of.

So:

• uharibifu wa kifurushi = damage of the package / damage to the package

A very important point: wa agrees with uharibifu, not with kifurushi.

That is why the connector is wa here. In Swahili, these of-type connectors change depending on the noun class of the first noun.

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Why is it mkubwa and not just kubwa?

Because adjectives in Swahili usually agree with the noun they describe.

The noun uharibifu belongs to a noun class that takes agreement like m- in this kind of adjective, so:

• -kubwa = the adjective stem
• m-kubwa = the correct agreeing form here

So mkubwa means big/great/serious in agreement with uharibifu.

To an English speaker, this can feel strange at first, because English adjectives do not change form to match nouns.

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