Counting days
Here are the Giriama phrases meaning "first day", "second day", ... :
siku ya kwanza or siku ya mosi
siku ya hiri
siku ya hahu
siku ya ne
siku ya hiri
siku ya hahu
siku ya ne
Exercise
Can you give the Giriama phrases meaning 5th day, 6th day... 10th day?Variation and pronunciation
So to make up the phrases first, second etc, you just take the ordinary counting numbers (mosi, hiri, hahu, ne, ...) and put them after ya.More traditional Giriama speakers - elder, more rural speakers - will use mosi. More urban, younger Giriama speakers will use kwanza, like the Swahili. However, it is not pronounced quite the same as the Swahili word kwanza! Remember, we saw in Pronunciation 4: stops that kwanza is pronounced a bit like kpwanza. Listen to these sounds again if you aren't sure.
(Side note: I have seen older inventories of Swahili sounds which included a pronunciation of kw and gw like the Giriama. So I think some speakers of Swahili will indeed pronounce it like that - I'm not sure who though. Not, thankfully for European learners, speakers of Standard Swahili, like that spoken in Dar Es Salaam.)
This is my first day
ii means this (when referring to days - as usual, it depends on the noun class, so this person or this tree uses a different word. We will come back to this later.)Translate the following phrases:
ii ni siku yangu ya hahu
ii ni siku yangu ya chenda
ii ni siku yangu ya hiri
ii ni siku yangu ya chenda
ii ni siku yangu ya hiri
ni means is. (We will look at this in the next post.)
We have seen that -angu (yangu, wangu) means my. The word for our is -ehu (yehu, wehu). Translate the following phrases:
ii ni siku yehu ya tsano.
ii ni siku yehu ya handahu.
ii ni siku yehu ya kwanza.
ii ni siku yehu ya handahu.
ii ni siku yehu ya kwanza.
Counting months and years
You should remember that my is yangu for words in the N class, like baba and mama - and siku - but wangu for words in the M-WA class, like mulume and mwana.Just like that, the "a of relationship", the -a in ya, has to agree with the noun it comes after. First day is siku ya kwanza, but first month is mwezi wa kwanza. Since mwaka, meaning year, is from the same noun class as mwezi, first year is mwaka wa kwanza.
Translate the following phrases into English:
mwezi wa kwanza
mwaka wa hahu
mwaka wa hiri
mwaka wa hahu
mwaka wa hiri
Pronunciation
mw, like kw, is a single sound, not one after the other.Exercises
haha means here, and kwa means for. Translate the following phrases into English:
Hu haha kwa siku tandahu. Ii ni siku yehu ya kwanza.
Hu haha kwa siku chenda. Ii ni siku yehu ya tsano.
Hu haha kwa siku kumi. Ii ni siku yehu ya kumi.
Hu haha kwa siku chenda. Ii ni siku yehu ya tsano.
Hu haha kwa siku kumi. Ii ni siku yehu ya kumi.
Say the following in Giriama:
We are here for 8 days. This is our second day.
We are here for 5 days. This is our fifth day.
We are here for 7 days. This is our third day.
We are here for 5 days. This is our fifth day.
We are here for 7 days. This is our third day.
Numbers for the N class
For counting N-class things like days, you should mostly be able to get away with using the counting numbers we saw in this post.
But since there are some slight differences, I have listed them here in full:
siku mwenga
siku mbiri
siku tahu
siḱu ǹe
siku tśaǹo
siku tandahu
siku fungaha
siku ńaǹe
siku chenda
siku kumi
(For speakers of Swahili, please notice that it is ne for 4, not nne. The tones are therefore completely different between Giriama siku ne and Swahili siku nne. I have listed them where my consultant corrected me...)
