Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Comparison between english and swahili Language

Similarities between Swahili and English

It would interest you to know that the Swahili language is spoken by more than twenty million people in Africa. It is spoken in countries like Kenya, Tanzania and Congo. It is a popular tribal language that has attracted a lot of attention and it is for this reason that people are very much interested in learning it. However learning it just like any new language is not that easy. You would have to exert a lot of effort and time. The good thing is that there are some similarities between Swahili and English languages which should be very much encouraging to anyone wanting to study it.

One of the simples of similarities between Swahili and English is the fact that the Swahili verbs always carry with them the subject and sometimes the object and the tense. This is also found mostly in the English language. For instance there is a word like ‘Ninakula’ which means ‘I am eating’. Indeed another thing worthy of note is that the personal pronouns in the Swahili language are all one word just like the English language. For instance there is a world like ‘Mimi’ which means ‘I’ and ‘Sisi’ which means ‘We’.

Another of the similarities between Swahili and English is that they all have classes of nouns. The English language for instance has several classes of nouns like the personal nouns and impersonal nouns. When you enter the Swahili language, there are a number of noun classes which are eight in number. These would include classes like the N class, M-MI class and the KI-VI class. The KI-VI class for instance is one that includes names that start with KI or VI like ‘Kit’ for chair and ‘Viti’ for chairs. The M-MI class may be quite confusing but it only deals with non-human nouns like ‘Miji’ for ‘towns’, ‘Mji’ for ‘town’ and ‘Mti’ for ‘tree’.

There are other similarities between Swahili and English that we can consider like the fact that they all recognise the seven days in the week. Moreover, with reference to time, they all appreciate the fact that the day is made up of twenty four hours even though there may be slight differences with respect to point of references at certain periods in time. For instance in Swahili, Saturday is recognised as the first day of the week while the sixth day would fall on Thursday.
Get your free report on learning swahili here: http://swahili101.com

2 comments: