Ikinyarwanda
on Geri Skeen (Rwanda), 26/Feb/2011 09:51, 34 days ago
The one good thing about ikinyarwanda is that it is the first language of all Rwandans (except some of those who grew up in exile and have returned since the genocide). Rwanda has been a country with more or less the same boundaries for centuries and, while it was handed around European powers a bit in colonial times, they didn’t carve it up. So if you speak ikinyarwanda, you can make yourself understood everywhere here. That’s where the good news ends as ikinyarwanda is a fiendishly difficult language to learn. You know how French has male and female nouns, so the word for old is‘vieux’ if applied to a man and ‘vieille’ if applied to a woman? And how German has male, female and neuter? Well, guess how many noun classes ikinyarwanda has: sixteen. That means that even if you know‘umunsi mwiza’ means ‘have a good day’ and you know the word for ‘weekend’ is, thankfully, ‘weekend’, you cannot assume that ‘Have a good weekend’ is ‘Weekend mwiza’. It is in fact‘Weekend nziza’. And‘Did you have a good walk?’ is ‘Watembereye neza?’ So you know there’s going to be a ‘za’ but you also have to learn which of sixteen beginnings to the word is the right one. There are of course also sixteen words for‘of’ – 100 Rwandan francs worth of beans and 100 Rwandan francs worth of tomatoes will use different words for ‘of’, because beans and tomatoes are from different noun classes. Sadly even numbers change according to the noun class. So I’ve just about learnt to count up to 100,000 (you need the high figures because £1 is 1,000 Rwandan francs), but that’s just the start: the number three, for example, is‘gatatu’ but if I want to say I have three sisters, it’s ‘barumuna batatu’ rather than ‘barumana gatatu’. The number five is‘gatanu’ but five thousand is ‘ibihumbi bitanu’ as the number five takes on the noun class of the word for thousands.Numbers are different again when telling the time. Here, you use Swahili numbers instead, though not for all twelve hours. And 1 o’clock uses the Swahili word for seven; 2 o’clock uses the Swahili word for eight etc. It isn’t perhaps so stupid, making 7 o’clock the first hour, as it is the first full hour of daylight in a land almost on the equator, where the time of dawn varies little year round.I mentioned the word for‘sisters’ earlier but I must point out that ‘barumuna’ actually means ‘younger sisters’. There’s a different word for older sisters. Oh, and if you are a boy, barumuna means‘younger brothers’ instead.Some ikinyarwanda words speak volumes about the culture. For example, a single woman is‘umukobwa’; literally the person who brings the cow. This is because when a man wants to marry a woman, he must save enough money to buy a cow, or failing that banana beer or a case of Fanta, to take to the woman’s father. I have in fact met a man who the previous week had taken a cow to a man to ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Until a man can afford a wife, he cannot marry. ‘Umukobwa’ is also the word for ‘daughter’. ‘I am married’ translates as ‘ndubatse’; literally, ‘I have a home.’The word for‘Goodbye’ is ‘Mwirirwe’ meaning ‘Stay alive during the day’ while ‘Goodnight’ is ‘Muramuke’, meaning ‘Don’t die during the night.’ Actually, there’s more than one word for goodbye; it depends how soon you are likely to see the person again. Luckily many older Rwandans speak a bit of French and most younger ones speak a bit of English.