Lesson 4

One of the beauties of the Swahili language is a certain harmony found in its sentences which is obtained by having as many words as possible begin with the same initial or a letter associated to it. Let me demonstrate (and don't worry about the vocabulary used here; we will treat that later...) :

turned into

The same way

became

This is of course just the transformation from singular into plural. But look at the following:

And I could go on...

So how to orient ourselves in a sentence like this? We need one stable factor around which everything else evolves. Our compass are the nouns. They are the factor which determines every other word.

Swahili nouns are grouped together in different Noun classes. Those noun classes are organized according to initial letters, topics or origin. e.g. most foreign words are grouped together. There are groups for animals, jobs, nouns made up from verbs, words starting with the letter 'k' ...

With the words we learned so far we hit two of these marks:

1. All our words started with the letter 'm'
2. All our words described people or professions.

The words we learned belong all to the First Noun Class and their plural form would count as the Second Noun Class.

You could also call it the M/Wa Class and thus count class 1 and 2 together by one single name.

All in all there are 18 noun classes. If you think that this sounds too frightening, you may cut this down almost by half considering that most groups have a singular and a plural class. Anyway we will get there little by little...

Now let's look at some adjectives:

If our adjective describes a noun of the M/Wa Class, M/Wa is exactly what we have to add to make it fit: M - for singular or Wa- for plural.