Blog filler

Since I have not been doing very exciting things lately (discourse charting is not that thrilling an event to put on a blog), I thought I'd share a few things I like about the languages that I am working with, mostly fun words.

Zanaki: during the time I was working with texts, I noticed 2 words that made me smile, both of them borrowed from English and Zanakiized! Try saying them to yourself and see if you know what they mean, though one is pretty obvious - 'epasword' and 'rendorova'. If you are getting stuck with the second one, I should probably point out that 'r' and 'l' are pretty interchangeable in Zanaki, since they don't have 'l' but Swahili does, so they often get confused. I was amused by the first word, because it is so completely English, yet the writer has stuck a class prefix onto it, making it a class 9 word. Maybe that doesn't amuse most people, but I am being linguistically nerdy now!

Swahili: here are some fun words that are completely made up of vowels - 'aiue' and 'uoe'. The first means 'he (subjunctive) should kill it' and the second is 'you (subj) should marry'.
The next Swahili words that have the potential to confuse are kuoza and kuuza - the first has 2 meanings, 'to be rotten' and 'to (cause to) marry' as does the second 'to sell' and 'to cause to kill'. It is probably best not to confuse them!
And here are a few other fun words to leave you with - 'kipilefti' (say it as it is written) - a roundabout, 'lililolala' - it which slept (ok, the subject prefix is unlikely, but it makes a fun word!), and 'umuumamo' - you are biting him (there).

Well, I should have something more interesting to say next week, as I am off to Zanzibar tomorrow for a week :)