Questions tagged [bantu]
For linguistic questions about the Bantu languages, a family of languages (with Swahili and Zulu as its most prominent members) spoken in the central and southern parts of Africa.
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Origin of the habitual tense in Swahili
How far back can a tense like hu, which fails to agree with its subject, be reconstructed in Swahili? Alternatively, do we know which construction it developed from?
This question is based on reading ...
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What is "mupigane" in Swahili? [closed]
In this sentence: "Wazazi waliwaambia watoto wao: 'Badala ya kufa nyumbani nendeni mupigane.'", I assume "mupigane" is a conjugated form of the verb "kupiga" (fight). ...
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Subject prefixes in Bantu languages
Background
I'll be up front: this question arises from trying to crack a Lingala song. There is this polyphonic Lingala religious hymn, Salelaka Mokonzi, which is very well-known among members of ...
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Do other languages have an "irreversible aspect"?
Like many languages, Lingála combines tense, aspect, and mood into a single TAM marking. Three of these TAMs pertain to the past:
a-kɛnd-ákí "he left earlier today" (hodiernal/recent past)
a-kɛnd-áká ...
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Does Swahili have relational nouns?
I've just come across the concept of relational nouns, and I'm curious if Swahili's position-indicating words count.
In Swahili, there's a possessive particle -a that joins nouns together. For ...
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Word frequency list for agglutinative languages like Swahili?
I'm an intermediate Swahili speaker looking to substantially increase the size of my vocabulary over the next couple weeks. However, I want to optimize my learning curve by focusing on the first 2000 ...
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