Swahili Has 11** Genders**
Вставка
- Опубліковано 21 чер 2023
- Go to squarespace.com/KKLEIN to get a free trial and 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.
Thanks to my patrons!!
Patreon: www.patreon.com/user?u=73482298
Written and created by me
Art by kvd102
Thanks to Letsko from Discord for checking my Swahili.
Music by me.
#linguistics #swahili #kiswahili
Kiswahili speaker from Kenya here. This was really insightful. An interesting thing I'd like to add is that in regular speech, a lot of Kenyans straight up ignore proper case use. For example, someone might say "Kiatu yangu"(My shoe) instead of the grammatically accurate "Kiatu changu" since "Kiatu" is in the "Ki-Vi" class.Proper case use is mostly required in formal situations. Btw way the words used to show case are called "ngeli". I'd also be interested to see a video on Kiswahili verb conjugation and how a single verb can contain so much information. eg "He will run" translates to "atakimbia" . Your Kiswahili pronounciation is good by the way. Just try to avoid dipthongs and elongated vowels.
very good point about colloquial language, though I think you meant "concord use" where you said "case use" in english :)
From my little time working with Kikuyu speakers it seems that it is never don’t in Kikuyu tho?
@@natheniel That's right. Swahili is widely spoken in Kenya, but it's only native to the coastal region. There's more than 40 other languages spoken in Kenya and since these are our true 'native' languages, they affect how we speak Swahili. Colloquial Swahili in Kenya is 'corrupted' by other Bantu languages, Nilotic languages, Cushitic languages and English. And we don't use it for a lot of official uses so there's really no incentive to do it right unlike in Tanzania.
But since Gikuyu/Kamba/Meru etc are spoken only by their native speakers, they are more grammatically 'pure'.
@@kui.kariuki that is true, people's mother languages may not always be Bantu and have similar class system features. i imagine a person who does not belong to the Bantu language speaking tribes would use Swahili very differently from one to another
I made an edit, Yule takes the agreements of the pre-prefix
Swahili has 15 genders, and every time someone complains we add 5 more.
lmao, thats good thats good
*uncomplains*
Good that only three people complained untill now...
Swahili has no gender pronouns though. No words for he/she/it
Perfect for Twitter users!
As I live in Rwanda and speak Kinyarwanda, I can say that although there are around 16 Genders, they way they are structurally integrated into words makes them often easier to memorize. You can never say Umuntu (man) without the "umu" and if you learn a word, you don't just forget half of it usually.
Also its really crazy how close bantu languages are with these classes, my Kinyarwanda knowledge basically just confirms everything in this video, even though I never learned Kiswahili.
When you said "Umuntu" i was like, daaamn we are so connected it's crazy. Cause i'm Zulu and we say Umuntu, same goes for Xhosa people.
In ChiShona it's Munhu, and KiSwahili it's Mntu
@@nduduzoblose4355in TshiLuba it’s Muntu and in Lingala it’s Mutu. My favourite part is that Bantu in tshiluba means “people” (batu in lingala) and that’s similar across Bantu languages afaik, so Bantu language really means People Language to most of the people who speak those languages. Genuinely a wonderful name for a wonderful language family
Honestly genuinely quite shocked that he pronounced Xhosa with a "k" at 2:38. As soon as he showed the map of the wider Bantu family I thought to myself "aaah, he's gonna flex on us with his perfect pronunciation of the aspirated lateral click". Threw me that he didn't!
they're European... it takes years to master... you also can't just do any random click. There's a whole bunch of different ones...
There are different dialects, some where it actually starts with a k sound (I think)
@@moonhunter9993 I know that! That's why I said "the aspirated lateral click" rather than "any random click". I was just surprised because Klein usually likes saying foreign words in impeccable accents
Yes I was shocked too
I do like saying foreign words, but I was talking about Xhosa in English, where it is pronounced with a /k/, so i decided i could get away with it this time. when i inevitably make a video about Xhosa, I will learn 😅
Polish has 5 noun classes based on this video
Singular;
1: Masculine
2: Neuter
3: Feminine
Plural;
4: Virile (Masculine)
5: Non-Virile (Feminine & Neuter Combined)
I think it's better to translate osobowy/nieosobowy as a animate/inanimate.
That's how I usually see it translated and virile/non-virile sounds a bit odd.
@@CM-ss5pe
That's a bit weird because virile is the masculine plural so it will be weird to call it "animate" and non-virile is the feminine & neuter plural combined so calling it "inanimate" would be weird too.
It's 7 actually
- masculine personal
- masculine animate
- masculine inanimate
- feminine
- neuter
- virile
- nonvirile
@@nexttlaanimate is virile and inanimate is non-virile
@@mcaeln7268 that's like calling woman an object. That's not gonna be good.
it does frustrate me endlessly that we call them genders for non IE languages. just call them noun classes, so much more informative
Gender just means category
@@the_linguist_ll but it doesn't just mean that, does it? the modern english speaker is almost universally confused or misled by a statement like 'Swahili has X genders'. if there were not other, more common, usages of the word, there wouldn't be that confusion.
Noun class is so much more intuitive it boggles the mind how it hasn't caught on
I have not watched the video yet so I don't know the specifics about Swahili, but for a noun class to be grammatical gender, there needs to be agreement. So, if it's just a noun suffix/prefix it's not gender, but if other parts of speech such as verbs, adjectives, pronouns, etc. are also marked, then it is.
@@nikossymeonidis5937Why didn't you just reserve the comment until you watched the video
what about semitic languages that also have masculine/feminine gender?
As a sympathetic language learner, I legit laughed out loud when you started going over the complex relationships between some of the noun classes. All of a sudden, Spanish’s 2 genders or German’s 3 - or Spanish’s 4 noun classes or German’s 4 - don’t seem all that tough
German has 4 noun classes?? how
I am German, I am confused
@@nessa1266Correct, I'll further note here that -innen is not it's own plural, it's merely a different way to form the Plural of words describing people in specific roles (e.g. teachers, actors...) that have been marked as explicitely female via the -in suffix that also makes the noun grammatically female.
@@nessa1266 ah ok
@@nessa1266 yep, exactly. I used to tongue in cheek refer to plural as a gender, but now I see it’s probably better understood as a noun class
Bantu noun classes are actually way easier than you might think. European genders seem so arbitrary, like there's little rhyme or reason as to why something is masculine or feminine. Meanwhile noun classes all fit into neat categories that all relate to each other.
Grammatical gender with only two gendered languages has always driven me up the wall, but as a Swahili speaker I love all the noun classes. It’s because grammatical gender doesn’t communicate anything useful, imo, while each noun class in Swahili commmunicates something. a female table? That’s nothing. Whereas in Swahili, each class has its general meaning. Ki-vi? That’s books, spoons, languages, stuff used around the house. M-wa? Easy, that’s for people (and animals to a lesser extent). Animate living things. M-mi is landscapes. Shops, trees, bridges, rivers. By looking at the prefix you can get a sense of what the object is a large portion of the time. A male orange means nothing.
That's awesome. Reading in Chinese is similar. There are particles that will tell you if it's water related, people related, fire related etc.
@@bistander I'm guessing by particles you mean radicals?
Grammatical gender conveys in the mind of the native speaker, everything. He and she and it is just 3 varieties of the same word. The same can be said of class 9?10 ins Swahili, there is no underlying idea (most foreign loans are dumped in here). You have animals and various things that seem arbitrarily in the same class. It is believed Bantu originally had more noun classes and many merged like Ka/Tu in Swahili merged with Ki/Vi. The same would have happened in Indo-European languages, the speakers of PIE had a reason to assign different genders. We still use vestiges of it in English. A ship is a SHE, the Moon is a SHE, though a lot of people are unaware of these pronouns. In Maasai you have male/large/strong as a gender, often referred to as masculine and female/small/weak often referred to as feminine. Then you have the single-gendered word Place. Ol Doinyo Mountain, opposed to En Doinyo hill. I get your first remark, French is taught in most English schools and nobody explained gender to me - very confusing. Many Bantu speakers, I have spoken too, were unaware of the Noun class system, until you pointed it out. As an outsider looking in, it was the first remarkable thing I noticed about Swahili. Fascinated, I went on to examine other Bantu languages.
I agree that it seems much more rational but its not like you can determine to which noun class any arbitrary noun belongs to based on concept alone so it's still pretty arbitrary. That's just the nature of language.
I'm a native Bantu speaker (I speak Gikuyu and Swahili) ,but even I learnt some things from this vid that I just kinda knew intuitively. The external perspective brings a new meaning to what I know.
I'm team 'noun classes' for this concept, since for the layman, the phrase 'gender' denotes a property of animals and humans. In Bantu languages, all animals belong to the same noun class, regardless of their gender. The phrase 'He went to Nairobi' would translate to 'Alienda Nairobi' in Swahili losing all information on the subject's gender. If the same phrase was translated to another gender-ed European language, the information would be retained. I would call Bantu languages genderless for this reason. And English would be a gendered language without noun classes.
I'm not a linguist though, so there might be something I'm missing about what 'gender' means in this context.
i agree with you, we should look at modern usage and related terms to see what term is better to use, and I prefer the term "noun classes" - in fact, to avoid confusion, i'd abolish the term "grammatical gender" as it's used for Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages as well!!
but just to prop up the other side of the argument, the original meaning of the word "gender" (from latin "genus") simply means "class" or "group", which is why some people still use it for Swahili and stuff.
@@kklein use the term " noun class" instead of "gender"
@@kklein use the term " noun class" instead of "gender"
As far as I can see only Swahili uses animals with personal agreements. This is believed to be the personification of animals in tales of the Brer Rabbit and Beatrix Potter style stories. I have not heard it in Gigikuyu or other Bantu languages - mutumia wakwa ni Mugikuyu.
@@kklein The origin of the word 'gender' is the context I was missing then. I still think noun class is more appropriate especially in a world where the concept of gender is controversial and more spoken about. I'm glad you agree.
More often than not, when one uses the term gender they mean the property of being male or female. Something that Bantu languages don't care about. Pronouns and concords in Bantu languages don't change depending on one's gender.
Love this video! I am a South African and have always loved languages. I speak about 4/5 languages at a conversational level (among them English and Afrikaans which have no grammatical gender) and learnt IsiZulu and IsiXhosa (each with 15 noun classes) at School. I found it incredible how logically and beautifully the languages flow because of all the noun agreement and found it quite funny/ignorant when people complained about the “impossible task” of learning a language like French with only 2 genders.
Don’t really know where I was going with this comment but hey … Bantu languages are cool.
Polish linguists consider Polish to have 5 noun classes: masculine-personal, masculine-animate, masculine-inanimate, feminine, neuter.
I saw *this* X and *these* Xs.
- masculine-personal: Widziałem *tego* chłopca i *tych* chłopców (boy)
- masculine-animate: Widziałem *tego* psa i *te* psy (dog)
- masculine-inanimate: Widziałem *ten* nóż i *te* noże (knife)
- feminine: Widziałem *tę* dziewczynkę i *te* dziewczynki (girl)
- neuter: Widziałem *to* dziecko i *te* dzieci (child)
It gets confusing considering that Polish has 7 cases and in some cases the difference between masculine noun classes might not be immediately visible.
In Croatian there's only four. We don't distinguish personal and animate in masculine. They both use the cognate to the Polish animate pattern. Although neuter plural nouns have a different alignment. To copy your examples:
Vidio sam *tog* dječaka i *te* dječake. (boy)
Vidio sam *tog* psa i *te* pse. (dog)
Vidio sam *taj* nož i *te* noževe. (knife)
Vidio sam *tu* djevojčicu i *te* djevojčice. (girl)
Vidio sam *to* more i *ta* mora. (sea)
(I used the word for "sea" because the word for "child" (dijete) is irregular and uses the feminine mass noun (djeca) as its plural.)
dont forget the plural ones, virile and nonvirile, making it sum up to 7
Polish elementary school books consider Polish to have 5 genders. Polish linguists, as the author of video mentioned, analize them through two things: Latin tradition (masculine - feminine - neuter) and other Slavic languages (animate - inanimate). Their job is to COMPARE LANGUAGES! Not to teach people how to speak Polish ;)
But when you go to highschool (or was it middle school?) you will learn that we use numerals that are always ommited in the above analize.
Tu leżał chłopiec. Widziałeś teGO chłopcA? (ACC=GEN) Tu staLI DWAJ chłopcy. (masculine personal)
Tu leżał kot. Widziałeś teGO kotA? (ACC=GEN) Tu staŁY DWA koty. Masculine 2 (masculine animate)
Tu leżał długopis. Widziałeś ten długopis? (ACC=NOM) Tu leżaŁY DWA długopisy. (masculine inanimate)
Narzeczeni staLI w kolejce. (masculine personal plural, called in English: "virile")
The "narzeczeni" is "virile"? So what is with:
- DWAJ narzerzeni staLI w kolejce.
- DWOJE narzeczonych staŁO w kolejce.
Obviously in category called "virile" we have "masculine personal plural" and "mix personal plural".
Someone mentioned that it's about animate vs. inanimate. Let's look how it works when collectives are described:
Called: "feminine": Dziewczyna spadŁA z drzewa. Dziewczyny spadŁY z drzewa.
- Dziewczyna z dziewczyną spadŁY z drzewa.
Called: "feminine": Kaczka spadŁA z drzewa. Kaczki spadŁY z drzewa.
- Dziewczyna z kaczką spadŁY z drzewa.
Called: "masculine animate": Kot spadŁ z drzewa. Koty spadŁY z drzewa.
- Dziewczyna z kotem spadLI z drzewa. - It's not true that virile always needs male person, and is always cannected to masculine personal singular.
- Kaczka z kotem spadŁY z drzewa.
Called: "masculine animate": Hamburger spadŁ z drzewa. Hamburgery spadŁY z drzewa.
- Dziewczyna i hamburger spadŁY z drzewa.
Called: "masculine inanimate": Zeszyt spadŁ z drzewa. Zeszyty spadŁY z drzewa.
- Dziewczyna i zeszyt spadŁY z drzewa.
There is an entire online dictionary (Słownik gramatyczny języka polskiego) made by prof. Zygmunt Saloni adding numerals (with 9 genders). There is depreciation aspect added, but no concept of singulare tantum (a noun without plural form, e.g. odzież) but plurale tantum (a noun without singular form, e.g. Katowice) exist.
Polish language is interesting in this regard. It has 3 genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) like many Indo-European languages. However, masculine nouns (and also masculine adjectives and pronouns) have animacy distinction. Inanimate nouns have accusative forms identical to nominative while animate nouns have accusative forms identical to genitive (however animate nouns behave like inanimate in plural). There are also personal animate nouns which have their own distinct ending for nominative plural and have accusative forms identical to genitive also in plural.
- What is your gender?
- I'm a mechanic.
Easily the best comment on this video
_meet the engineer intensifies_
based
no idea why but this nonsense made me giggle - so have an upvote.
ah so in swahili Combat Helicopter IS a gender xDD
My favorite part of Kiswahili is all the arabic loan words. The Swahili traders were very prolific and often did business with lots of Arabic speakers, so they took the language back with them. As a Hebrew learner, I can find the semitic influence in Safari and Kitabu. It makes me feel like that meme of that guy pointing at the screen
I speak Hindi/Urdu and I'm picking up so many words too (Arabic words, obviously)
Literally both of its words for "thank you" (asante) and "you're welcome" (karibu) are from Arabic too. As are the words for friend (rafiki), but (lakini), reason (sababu), coffee (kahawa), and cold (baridi), among countless others.
We call the noun classes, Ngeli in Swahili
time to learn about my parents' language despite never speaking it to them and only nodding in agreement when my mom accidentally speaks it to me instead of the two other langauges i speak!
The moment I knew why Simba in The Lion King was named like that. 😲😲😲😲😲😲😲😲
I had exactly the same reaction when I learned that the Arslan's name from Cronicles of Narnia by Lewis has been taken from Turkish "Aslan" which also means just a "lion" xd
I’m learning Swahili right now. I’m a bit confused. When you refer to ‘gender’ do you just mean ‘noun classes’? For sure the grammatical concept of noun classes is BY FAR the hardest part of the language for me, as a non-native learner. I was blown away when I realized how many noun classes there were and how I had to determine which class a noun was in and then I had to match the verb, adjective, etc with every sentence to the noun every time I wanted to utter a sentence. Learning Swahili will be a 10-year project for me (probably longer), but I’m determined to get to a C-level before I die.
Yes the term (grammatical) gender has been historically used for this concept. In my current Linguistics classes, which are in german, a language commonly described as having grammatical genders, I most commonly hear the term Genus and sometimes noun class, instead of the more direct equivalent of Geschlecht. I would say at least in academia people are moving away from the term of grammatical gender.
I like your videos but always wish they were longer! For example it would have been nice to see a couple of examples of what type of words fit into each class here
Swahili speaking transphobe: “THERE ARE ONLY 11 GENDERS! NO MORE”
lol
@@huguesdepayens807 genders and sexes are not the same thing by definition, your correct in that statement, nobody ever disagreed with you.
@@mushroomy9899 Gender isn't real, it's made up. You only have your sex and that's it.
@@mushroomy9899 we all know. Sex is what you're born "with/as", gender is assigned or chosen.
@@moonhunter9993 he clearly doesn’t.
You made me really excited with that locative stuff!
I’m so glad to see you came back and made another video expanding on Swahili more. It’s such an interesting language! I personally lean toward the term noun classes.
here in malaysia
you call girls and boys in singular
"dia" just dia
but for plural
it's "dia orang"
and when you were talking to them
it will be "kamu"
if you want to say "me and my friend"
it's "kami" or "kita"
i don't know what is the difference about kami or kita
Kita includes the listener. So you use it when you want to tell the listener something that involves you and the listener.
"Kita akan pergi ke pasar."
"We (with the listener) will go to the market."
Kami excludes the listener. So you use it when you want to tell the listener about something that involves you and someone else.
"Kami pergi ke sekolah pada waktu pagi."
"We (exclude the listener) went to school in the morning."
afaik virtually all Austronesian languages are gender-neutral or genderless meaning grammatically, we don't distinguish between masculine and feminine (or maybe even noun cases entirely*)
In practice, a sibling of Malay/Bahasa Indonesia, Tagalog/Filipino doesn't have a "he" OR "she" equivalent, yet singular and plural "they" are separate words ("siya" and "sila" respectively). All our pronouns are gender-neutral and does not encode for any gender in its meaning let alone in nouns. (We also have pronouns that distinguish whether the listener is included or excluded)
The only words that DO have gender however are: Spanish loanwords/loaned suffixes (-ero/-era), most kinship terms ("kuya" means older brother while "ate" means older sister), and the words (nouns) for males and females ("lalaki" and "babae" respectively in the singular form)
@@aI-si9zm hate it because it makes people think we are gender-neutral hippies, so I propose three gendered pronouns for Malay:
sialai (male, from si-ia nu laki)
siabai (female, from si-ia nu babay)
siatang (inanimate)
Example:
He said she would come late, she is taking care of her cat, it is sick.
Sialai kata siabai datang lambat sebab nak rawat kucing, siatang sakit.
Just discovered your channel. WOWWWWW!!!!!! Thanks for all this massive information - and so well put. Merci. Asante. Dziekuje. Grazie.
Oh, I'll remind that in Latin, usually having pretty consistent gender, "nauta" (sailor) is male (nauta bonus) and all trees are feminine in Latin because of what I've been told is a cultural thing (arbor bona, although "-or" is usually a male ending like in senator)
The Indo-European feminine comes from collective nouns. Maybe all trees being feminine has something to do with that?
@@blerst7066well, I still believe it's a cultural thing. They believed that trees had female spirits, the dryads
"-or" ending of masculine nouns typically becomes "-ōr" in oblique cases as in "senātōrem", but in "arbor" it stays short, as in "arborem". "Arbor" comes from rhotacism of "arbōs", while "senātor" is "senātus" + "-tor".
Oh, and short forms of names in Russian often end in an -a, but male names stay male, although they are declined like a typically female noun
Same with Polish, e.g. Jakub → Kuba is still Male, despite behaving like female.
@@bubbletea695معاوية
اسامة
Male names ending in tied t, the letter at the end of female nouns. Arabic. However, we don't conjugate it like female, because the tied t isn't about being female, but it exists because some t sounds at the end of words became h sounds.
So cool! Thank you for sharig
Ninajifunza kiswahili sasa (I'm learning swahili right now), and I can confirm the the noun cases are very hard to get ahold of, especially since some noun classes are the same, like how the m- prefix denotes a singular plant OR a singular animate noun. The syntax being similar to english does help, but still.
Don't worry, they get harder. Sometimes in spoken language the class changes to communicate how the speaker feels about the object. Mtoto (child) will turn into kitoto as a term of endearment and to indicate a smaller child, whereas litoto might be used for a small child with a less positive meaning, or katoto for a more negative meaning with no indication of size. You also have the ji/j class that indicates something big and scary/repulsive like how a big ugly snake would be joka or a big scary person might be jitu, but syke both of those have also just become the respective words for giant and dragon.
@@FranciT98 Oh wow, that sounds very cool. Not really looking forward to needing to memorize that all though...
Originally from my understanding, they were tonally different. Swahili, unlike most Bantu languages, is not tonal, though may have been once. In Kikuyu, these 2 prefixes are tonally different, which is why I am assuming Swahili may well have once been.
I‘m just going to like this in advance, your videos are always great
I mean, genus in Latin meant "type", so grammatical gender FROM THE START meant "noun class" without any implication of the modern/renaissance/medieval sense of "gender" as "sexual categorisation", let alone the contemporary sense of "cultural traits associated to sexual categorisation, but also overall identity". Latin grammarians didn't call it grammatical sex because it didn't match real world sexual dimorphism well (not even if we allow for metaphoric use for sexless objects and concepts)
Thanks for this comment. The title was really clickbait.
Oh wow. Thank you for making this note. This video's title is really unfortunate. I thought that the only problem was that Swahili's grammatical genders have literally nothing to do with gender but this raises another important point. Lol. So many people missed the point that he made towards the end of this relatively shirt video because they want to talk gender politics instead of grammar.
nice! i just startetd learning Swahili a months ago, i noticed these inconsistencies aswell.
having to learn these in school as a non-native Swahili speaker was so hard, and the teachers didn't help by caning you everytime you got them wrong, just made it even harder
Most Kenyan teachers are sadists. I'm pretty sure that's why they join the profession.
😢 sorry
I personally like the approach taken in A Grammar of Gyeli the most, where every combination of classes a noun can trigger agreement in between singular and plural is considered to be its own gender. Gyeli has 9 classes, but it's analysed as having 6 major genders and 11 minor ones, with every observed combination, like the two nouns that have 8/6 agreement for singular/plural, counted as its own minor gender.
You both confused me and convinced me that Swahili is cool as f. I’m adding it to the long list of languages I would like to learn someday. Right up there with Japanese and Icelandic.
Also intresting to add that (at least in Tanzania) there are also 2 colloquial but not formal (which is why you cant normally find them taught or in grammars) noun classes/1 gender, the singular is ka- which is used much more often than the technically correct ki- in a diminutive sense, it can also be animate or inanimate, for example "umeona kale kagari pale" have you seen that tiny car over there, "umekaona kale katoto" have you seen that little child, common agreement words are ka (-a) kangu (-angu) kadogo (-dogo) kazuri (-zuri) also used to express the small quantity of an uncountable object, kamaji (from maji) means a tiny bit of water. In the plural we usually use vi- which is the plural of ki- but the actually plural of ka- is tu-, for example "umeona (-tu- not used so as not to confuse with the agreement for us) tule tutoto pale" have you seen those little kids over there, or "hutu tutembele ni twa kwangu" these matembele are mine, "umeona tusaa twangu" have you seen my little watches
The ka-/tu- class also exist in kituba
Originally Bantu had pre-prefix and class prefixes. Yule, takes the agreement of the pre-prefix the reason it looks similar in Ki and Vi is the pre-prefix and class prefix were identical eg Ki-ki-ntu. A person might have been Gu-Mu-ntu, where the G transforms to a Y in Yule. Lumsaba in Uganda still uses pre-prefix. Swahili does in some little-known constructions like Majitu (MiJitu in Mombasa) for giants, singular however is Jitu. The pre-prefix is present in the Interlacustriune languages and Nguni languages where it is reduced to an initial vowel as in A-ma-Zulu, A-Ba-Zulu, U-Mu-Ntu, I-si-Zulu.Bantu languages are fascinating though. I would love to know more about what is termed the Semi-Bantu languages. Some seem to have class affixes, rather than prefixes or a similar, but smaller noun class system, with unrelated vocabulary.
Of course, we all know they really skipped class 13 because it was bad luck
Okay, so I'm a Kenyan Swahili speaker. Now, usually in schools here in Kenya we're taught these classes according to their verb concords and not the nouns themselves. Like the first and second class "M/WA", would be considered "A/WA". This is the noun class of living things, to be precise, animals. So it wouldn't be "Simba ile ilikula nyama" ( The lion ate meat), it would be "Simba yule alikula nyama" and also the plural would be "Simba wale walikula nyama" in standard Swahili.
This totally simplifies a lot of work. Here are the rest of the classes;
Class 3&4 > "U-I" ; Refer to various types of trees and typically most words that start with 'M' but are not animals
Class 5&6 > "LI-YA" ; Refer to big things and various types of fruit( Most of these words don't start with "ji" and are just their own morphemes e.g lengo(objective)-malengo(objectives) or neno(word)-maneno(words)). The ones that do start with the prefix "ji" are usually nouns in their big forms. Usually this is done by just adding the "ji" prefix but nouns that start with nasals are either replaced by it or the nasal is just dropped completely with no addition of a prefix. This is seen in words like "Mji" (town) and the big forms would be "Jiji" (City) as seen in the video.
Class 7&8 > "KI-VI" or "CH-VY" ; Refer to tools, abstract concepts and small things(which class 13 was comprised of). These nouns (small things) are made by taking the big forms of the noun then just attaching the prefix "ki".
Class 9&10 > "I-ZI" ; Refer to nouns that don't take any plural at all. Most of these words start with "n". This also includes languages, which usually start with "Ki" but don't take the plural form "Vi". It also includes loanwords from languages like English.
Class 11&12 > "U-ZI" ; In my knowledge, typically nouns that start with "u" but are not abstract nouns as they have a class of their own. Usually if the noun has 3 or less syllables "ny" is added as a prefix as in " Ufa(crack) - nyufa(cracks) and if it has more, the "u" is dropped as in "ukuta(wall) - kuta(walls). Some of them might also start with /w/ as in "wakati(time)" and when following the rules it becomes "nyakati(times) in plural.
Class 14 > "U-U" ; Refer to abstract nouns mainly and so don't really have there own plural. There is also the "U-YA" as stated in the video which is kind of hard to explain as there are a few words in it and very few similarities among them. Look at "uyoga(mushroom)-mayoga(mushrooms)" and "ugonjwa(disease)- magonjwa(diseases). It all comes down to just knowing what words belong to it.
There is also a class for uncountable nouns that is "YA-YA". This class is comprised of only liquids as far as I know. But some liquids are considered not be in a different class like tea (chai) which is considered to be in the "I-I" class which i believe only has things like sugar( sukari) and salt (chumvi) as the only nouns in it other than tea.
Class 15 > "KU-KU" ; Only for infinitives like to run, "kukimbia", or to read, "kusoma". This is not to be confused with the locative class "KU" which in an informal context where class isn't considered may commonly be confused with. This is because the locative class is used a lot more than the infinitives one. So the listener is more used to hearing the locative and will consider the it first before noticing the infinitives.
Class 16,17&18 > "PA-KU-MU" ; This is the locative class that only has "mahali" or "pahali" as the only nouns.
The "PA" is used for specific places or when both the listener and speaker know the place being talked about.
The "KU" is used for generalised places. That's why you may find prepositions like "kwenye" for "on" originating from this class. But sometimes the meaning of those prepositions changes depending on context.
And the last one "MU" is used for internal places. Like when referring to places within something. Nouns here are derived by adding the suffix "-ni", not to be confused for the ones used in verbs to indicate plurality when talking to people, to the end of another noun. That noun now refers to the internal place of it. As in "shule" for school then "shuleni" for inside the school as a place.
All the noun classes I've mentioned refer to the concords used in Swahili or more specifically the ones used in verbs to indicate subject. Examples:
Mti ulikatwa- The tree was cut
Miti ilikatwa- Trees were cut And so on.......
I remember seeing some polandball meme about how Finnish apparently has an insane number of noun cases, something I've wanted to learn more about that I don't fully understand. Almost started trying to learn Finnish because of that, too.
Finnish cases just roughly correspond to prepositions.
I thin k i know that meme :) kinda threw Finnland of the List of possible destinations for me.
Checkmate, gender studies skeptics XD
Now we know what the discord question was for, amazing video, love it
Dear K Klein, noun classes like you are describing are different from gender in a very particular way. Gender is a class of noun that is associated with all inflected nouns for the same dictionary entry. This is an important information because the fact that multiple dictionary entries (multiple categories of things) are subsumed by a generic category (a gender) implies that not only words but also things are being categorised. As for me, I do not see any problem for a language to have 17, 20 or more genders (generic categories of things). We have many more common nouns and corresponding categories in our languages, so I see here no actual problem. To start studying how these generic categories organize human experience, I would suggest you verify the genders for different species of plants, animals, land facilities/amenities and agricultural tools. I imagine that farm animals will be divided into two genders for the same species (male vs female) and that wild animals will be divided into groups such as flying preys, running preys and predators like they do in European languages. Think a little bit more about it again. You may find out interesting facts about Swahili that have not yet been published.
Thanks for this comment which goes against the clickbait
I love learning about different cultures and places. It’s very fascinating. Especially as someone who doesn’t really fit in with any culture 😅 not even my own. I mostly do my own thing and remain mostly solo
In school we learned the verb based version instead of adjectives. So m/wa becomes a/wa ( mtu *a*likuja / watu *wa*likuja - a person came/people came).
All living things (plants not included) get grouped to the a/wa class except when exaggerating the size of the object. Mtoto *a*mekula (a/wa) - the child has eaten, becomes kitoto *ki*mekula (ki/vi) - the (small) child has eaten
I can't remember all of them but they were 22 ngeli in total.
Ukrainian technically has noun classes in addition to genders, nouns and corresponding adjectives will. And as you say it's filled with exceptions as well as parallel options (two or three different inflection patterns will fit a single noun, with prevalence of one changing regionally, but it's not simply a dialect thing because they coexist to a large degree in literature and formal speech, so they're all valid in standardised language)
An inflection pattern of a noun is called a declension, and it has nothing to do with noun classes. Swahili has no declensions, but many noun classes. Malayalam has no noun classes, but many declensions. Nouns of different classes can share the same declension; it's really obvious in Latin, where masculine and feminine nouns can exist in any of the 5 declensions and are morphologically indistinguishable.
what he was trying to explain is "ngeli". i think it should be approached as it is. if you try to apply logic from other languages you know it gets compicated really quick. i know since swahili is one of my native "bantu" languages. the rules change again completely again for "nilote", "cushite", etc tribe languages. i also learnt scandinavian languages and english as well as french. as well as a bit japanese and chinese and korean.
here is what i learnt ultimately. languages are continent based they might be somewhat different but the structure and how they do thing is similar if they are from the same continent. asian language logic is hard to use when learning english. in the same way european language logic is hard to use when learning asian or african languages. depending on if your know another language in that continent use that, if not dont use anything, learn it a new.
"Let's bring stuff to the coast and sell it and become the Swahili on the Swahili coast" said the Swahili on the Swahili coast
Brilliant ..all the best.
Thanks for providing another detailed peek into linguistics. Really enjoying these videos. I will save this one and send it to all my friends who, even after living in Berlin for 6 years, don't speak German and complain about the grammar. Btw, this reminds me a lot of people claiming Hungarian has "26 cases", when in fact I more see them like "word modifier options", replacing prefixes, adjectives, prepositions, etc. especially because they are so regular and predictable. Like a computer-menu-system.
With your interpretation of noun classes/genders, can the measuring word system of Chinese be regarded as a noun class system? Nouns are divided into groups that affect how the number words should change/which measuring words should be attached to the number words.
I don’t think so. In true noun class systems, most nouns each have one classification which is inherent in the noun itself which then systematically modifies the words around it. In Chinese, each noun can take many different classifiers, which pretty much means, that there is no singular category of classifier inherent in the noun. That’s not to mention the fact that classifiers are only used with numbers and demonstratives (which themselves don’t agree with the noun or classifier in anything, let alone any agreement in adjectives or verbs). In Swahili, a difference in the class prefix places the noun in a different category. That doesn’t happen with the classifier systems. English still has agreement in certain words including the 3rd person and relative pronouns, but that isn’t systematic agreement and so generally isn’t called a noun class system.
From my experience of learning Turkish it actually makes little sense to use grammatical categorisations of
a language that doesn’t really work within that language.
You try to compare different languages but they don’t really work the same. Take prepositions for example. I’m Turkish the equivalent consists of affixes so that it is part of the noun itself. You have pronouns in Turkish, but also verbs have affixes depending on the person. And normally you omit the pronouns when you already have an affix indicating who you’re talking about.
What I learned is that it makes more sense to describe a language using the grammar that the speakers uses. So I guess if Kiswahili speakers don’t use grammatical genders, then it probably isn’t needed to count them.
And let us not forget:
If every language was interchangeable, words had exact equivalents, grammar could be translated, expressions was the same. Then you don’t really need more than one language. The FUNCTION of several languages is that they describe things differently. They have their own expressions and nuances that makes them unique from other languages. So the differences are more important than the similarities if that makes sense.
At times I use the prefixes on certain languages or people groups coz of the noun class system in Swahili and Luhya
Glad you chose Italian as a foil for Swahili ✌️🇮🇹
While using “gender” to describe all noun classing systems is not accurate, I think it is useful to at least use when introducing the concept of noun classes, especially to speakers of indo-european languages. I know for me, Spanish and Romance languages were my first introduction to a foreign language and, though I thought gender was a weird thing to do to a noun, it’s pretty easy to understand. Once you start getting into cases, it’s easy to compare them to genders or (more usefully) conjugations of verbs, but for nouns. Obviously, for IE languages, those are the extent of our classifications, and it’s easy to separate them out into gender/plurality/case, but classing nouns in other languages should be taught as a more general idea of taking those classifications and abstracting them out even further.
this is completely unrelated but when I was a kid one of my friends taught me Spanish words and said that they were Swahili and I completely believed him.
Very interesting!
There are actually 8 noun classes in Kiswahili. It’s a characteristic of most Bantu languages called Ngeli where the first noun creates an alliteration in the rest of the sentence.
Also the classes are named after the first morpheme on the verb that follows the noun, so the noun classes are
1. A-WA
2.U-I
3. LI-YA
4. KI- VI
5. U-YA
6. U-ZI
7. KU
8. PA-MU-KU
I learnt 11 noun classes. Idk when you formally learnt Swahili but I think TUKI added the number of noun classes in like the 2010's or something
@@venahkashmira8396he forgot to add U-U and I-I
As a Kiswahili and Bantu speaker from southern Uganda, we just ignore the genders and go absolutely without the grammar rules, which makes for a “Ugandan dialect”
5:15
For romanian i see it as a possibility that the noun class system _could_ become more complicated (but obviously still not as complex as swahilis), because there are feminine nouns that have whatd generally be considered a masculine ending
roată -> roți (f)
poartă -> porți (f)
mut -> muți (m)
tont -> tonți (m)
So i wouldnt be surprised if this agreement change development would occur, from what i remember those feminine nouns did originally have an -e plural ending, but it got reduced to just final palatalisation. I dont know during what period this development occured, and if that period wouldve given it enough time for the agreement change to occur if there wasnt any other factor that wouldnt let the change appear for some reason that will continue to not let it change. Dont know if there are any similar cases with words in italian.
Gender is not equal to noun morphology, but to the concords it triggers on other syntactically attached words. For example, Latin has 5 declensions, though just 3 genders. 1st declension in -a holding overwhelmingly feminine nouns can also have masculines. Same for Spanish pianista that is masculine.
@@Zdrange03 Noun morphology isnt always tied to gender but you cant ignore its effect on it, romanian "scaun (m sg) - scaune (f pl)" derives from neuter latin "scamnum" with its plural being "scamna", you can see the plural had a seemingly feminine ending, "ou (m sg) - ouă (f pl)" comes from neuter "ovūm - ovā", yet again a seemingly feminine ending, even though it wasnt actually feminine, which ended up changing gender in romanian
Never before have I been so confused after seeing something explained clearly in terms that I fully understand
In Oluluyia , we possess almost similar noun classes to Swahili
About Italian, wouldn’t the world classes be 5 rather than 4, since there are lots of words that end with “e” as a singular and as “i” with a plural and that can both be masculine and feminine?
Ok. This is absolutely way way beyond my linguistic skills.
Italian also has l' for words of both genders that start with a vowel, lo for masculine words beginning with a consonant cluster starting with s and ones starting with z. In the plural, these turn into gli. So italian has in total these articles for it's two grammatical genders and tenses:
masculine singular: il, lo, l'
feminine singular: la, l'
masculine plural: i, gli
feminine plural: le
Although, i find it weird calling noun classes genders, because things like beard (la barba in italian) are female despite a beard not being a female thing. Of couse women can also have beard growth, but it's more a masculine considered thing.
@@that1niceguy246and that's why is called grammatical gender and not "grammatical sex", for definition gender isn't necessarily correlated to sex since is a social construct.
Xhosa has a click in the name and I can’t tell if you used it or just /k/ in its place
well Xhosa has a click in its name in Xhosa. I used a /k/ instead since that's the name of the language in English.
I love Swahili so much it’s such a beautiful sounding and interesting language
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhythm_of_the_Pride_Lands this is a nice cd, if you like the Lion King
Saying German has polyplural nounclasses makes it sound that much more complicated.
(der, die, das > die Pl.)
(er, sie, es > sie Pl.)
I have a freind that speaks Swahili, he is from Tanzania
This seems like a confusing way to present this material. I learned it as "genders are noun classes. Some languages have more noun classes. Some have none.
And some languages also have nominalizef verbs which are given npun cases. Using masculine and feminine articles is just one way of marking a noun class."
Basque, Georgian Turkish
One class ( or two if one counts plurals)
My favorite gender system is Dyirbal’s: masculine, dangerous, edible plant, and miscellaneous
I can relate, most Bantu languages possess a noun class system
how is the plural of ugomvi magomvi, its plural remains the same because in swahili we classify them as nouns that cannot be counted, so it remains ugomvi in plural, just like uji(porridge) it remains uji in its plural form. these kind of nouns fall in the U-U class
this might be a dialectical difference, i believe the standard language as laid out by the government of Tanzania includes "magomvi" as the plural of "ugomvi", among other u-ma nouns - but Swahili changes massively from place to place (incl. within Tanzania, not everyone speaks what the government decided was the "official language"), so it doesn't surprise me at all that you have u-u class nouns for some speakers. out of interest, what kind of dialectical background are you coming from?
@@kklein ugomvi/ugomvi. i've never heard anyone say magomvi, but if they did, it would be gomvi/magomvi therefore technically in both noun classes.
Interestingly, these nouns classes get reviewed every once in a while. The noun classes I learned as a kid are slightly different from what kids are being taught now at school. Even more interesting is that, for informal situations, noun classes really don't seem to matter much as most Swahili speakers in Kenya will just ignore them altogether. I find that the main objective of informal Swahili, as with many other languages is to convey ideas in as few words as possible. This often involves completely ignoring the formal rules of syntax while at times combining foreign words and mashing them up to resemble Swahili words. It often results in something that, in formal Swahili, makes absolutely no sense, yet is strangely well accepted and understood. It's all quite interesting.
the cases video!!
I love grammatical gender (noun classes) like this, and my favorite troll thing to do is to refer to the noun classes (counting classes? Whatever) in Chinese, Japanese and Korean as grammatical genders to be obnoxious XD
Wait so "noun classes" wasn't supposed to be a more general term, applied to *all* languages? I was under the impression that it was just the more correct way to refer to "grammatical gender", and I will continue to use it that way.
I guess some people view the terms as separate, others as synonyms, and others take your view. I think his point was just that for Swahili especially people dislike the use of gender because it is extremely misleading. Some other commenter noted that gender itself comes from Latin word genus which just means class in the first place (and that's how gender was used in English for a while too, in that most generic sense, according to Wiktionary); so the Latin grammarians were apparently already essentially speaking of noun classes.
cool and good video
"theres only 2 genders" mfs when they see swahili
There are only two genders. Male and Female.
@@mariorizkallah5383who gets to decide that?
India has a legally recognized third gender and more population than all of Europe and north America combined.
Many other countries also have third genders.
@@rowbot5555 idk what borders drawn by colonisers (countries) have to do with this but yes many cultures across the globe recognise intersex as a gender
@@staticshockfan I was responding to someone who was trying to say that "everyone agreed that there were only two genders" or something along those lines, and I was pointing out that India disproves that fact handily.
It was a point about how much of the world recognizes gender as a very complex thing
Swahili's grammatical genders have nothing to do with gender. Gender is a grammatical term which only make sense in a European context because European nouns are gendered. Noun class is the much more accurate term.
Are there straight forwards rules for gender assignments? I read it on wikipedia: class 1 & 2 are people and a few exceptions. Class 9 mostly for loanwords. Are there lots of exceptions to the phonetic/ semantic rules?
Comments here are comparing the sheer NUMBER of noun classes/ genders but they don't realize the NUMBER =/= complexity for L2 learners. German has 3 genders and it is very hard to guess the gender (gender assignment chaotic). A language can have 70 genders and it can be simplistic if the assignment rules are clear without many exceptions.
Also, some gender/ noun class systems have collapsed a lot. Eg. In Wolof, 50% of the words belong to -bi gender despite it has 7+ noun classes.
As an italian I'm proud of my language being present in a swahili language video
I used to fluently speak swahili as a kid but after watching this vid and seeing laws I just used to know without thinking about it is now making me feel like I'll never learn swahili again 😭
Then wait what's the difference between noun classes/gender and grammatical cases? Not very familiarize with a lot of languages grammar
Cases are based on the context of the noun within the sentence while the class/gender is based on the noun itself. (I think)
@@Magic_Pickle123 Oh yeah that actually makes a lot of sense, thanks
Cases are like nomative/accusative, like the subject/object of a sentence
In my German book I made two tables on the back page, for "a" and "the". 3 genders (m/f/n) and 4 cases (nom/acc/dat/gen) means there's 12 forms of "a" and 12 forms of "the"
2:17 It’s hiding on the 13th floor of a hotel somewhere in The Bermuda Triangle.
Synthetic languages will really show you a spreadsheet and call it a language. /hs
Are class 1 and class 3 (both m-) distinguishable?
good question! but yes, even though they have the same prefix, they have different verb conjugations and other concords, so they are distinguishable grammatically :)
Interesting, but a bit confusing.
Norwegian also has some feminine and masculine nouns that look like they switch gender in the plural, but grammatically they still function as their correct gender
Norwegian is so wild since a lot of our language is just two words mashed togheter and then we gender certain things by just adding an "a" and stuff
@@KenanTheFab I don't think any of what you or I mentioned is that wild
I didn't pay attention to Swahili's 15 genders until you mentoned that's, not normal in other languages (Also the worst part of Swahili lessons was *CASSES* because i thought there were too many now i get why) Why do we have so many *Classes*
Is there any objective way to measure the complexity of a language's grammar? I'm coming at this as a complete layman, but it seems like this sort of grammar is a lot more complex than English. Is this wrong, or is English grammar equally complex in ways that are hard for me, as a native speaker, to understand?
So I might very well be missing something here, but from how Noun classes are defined here, having like 17 of them doesn't seem that non-standard, at least compared to IE languages. For example in Czech, while most people will tell you there are 3 genders (masculine, feminine, neuter), each of those have 4+ subgenders, for a total of about 15. If you were to count the plurals as their own thing, you'd get yourself about 30 noun classes in total.
Again, I'm not a linguist, but to me it seems that even when looking only at IE languages, saying "This language has X genders" doesn't really tell you the whole picture.
in the specific example of Czech, it would be best analysed in my opinion as having 8 noun classes, masculine animate, masculine inanimate, feminine, neuter, and then plurals for each of those. different declension patterns within the nouns themselves are usually not what is meant when the word "noun class" is employed, but rather how the words AROUND that noun are declined. ie. look at articles, adjective endings, etc. Czech is further complicated by its use of cases, but we usually see these as orthogonal to class (on a different axis, ie. imagine a table with the classes across the top and the cases along the side).
I do however agree with your final conclusion that saying that "a language has X genders/noun classes/whatever" doesn't give you the full picture. I believe these things are exception-riddled and very difficult to apply cross-linguistically for comparative purposes.
Hope you get what I'm on about :)
I mean... most languages don't have any noun classes. English only has the bare vestiges of them.
@@kklein Ah, thanks for the response, I think that cleared it up for me. Having Czech as a first language, I never really bothered to learn the proper linguistic term for "vzor", just thought of it as a kind of subgender, so I made a bit of a leap and assumed that they were one of the things that could define the various noun classes, hence my confusion. Never made the connection that "vzor" = "declension pattern", even though that's very obviously what it is. Given that definition, it makes sense that it'd be a separate thing from noun classes.
Wait when did it happen, that the plurals are considered as a whole different gender and not a subcategory of the gender of the singular? That’s how it is in Italian at least
Noun classes in Swahili it's called ngeli
That was not a video about languages right? it was a video about quantum physics or something
Im learning kiswahili and Im going insane
minute 3:55 Simba yule, Simba Wale..not ile zile...
Wait: Italian dropped the Latin neutrum and just kept the masculinum and femininum?
Old German speaker here: we learned the noun classes/ grammatical genders by learning:
neutrum: das Kind (the child)
masculinum: der Mann or der Vater (the man or the father)
femininum: die Frau or die Mutter (the woman or the mother).
This nicely enforced the impression that language kind of mirrored the "natural" gender.
You know: you start off as a nondescript kid and after puberty change into male or female.
This led to interesting conversations among us kids. Something about der Tisch (the table) must make it recognizable as "male" - That's where people get the idea from to endow totally genderless things with genderized adjectives.
So the sun is described differently if it's a Spanish masculine or a German feminine sun 🙄🖖
Uh, do kids lack genitals from which we can figure out their sex? Sure, only the parents see them, and not that often, but the kids know their own sex. They are not confused about it.
4:33 you are assuming that the singular represents the noun instead of the plural, but why?
purely convention. you can flip all those arrows on that chart if you want to
Why would it be confusing that there's no class 13 in Swahili but not if there's no floor 13 in American buildings?
Lmao
Wait I just looked it up and that wasn’t a joke, I thought you were talking about Wayside School.
@@the_demon149 out of curiosity, what did you Google?
@@cerebrummaximus3762 I don’t remember exactly, but it was probably something like “floor 13 american buildings”
Square space god damn karl
swahili is a language spoken by the swahili on the swahili coast