Ebook: Vocabularies of the Kamba and Kikuyu languages of East Africa

Publisher: Cambridge
Publication date: 1904
Number of pages: 89It is not necessary to append even grammatical notes to the following vocabularies. Both the Kamba and Kikuyu languages belong to the Bantu group and their construction is precisely similar to that of Swahili, that is, all grammatical inflexion takes place at the beginning of the word. The object in publishing a Swahili vocabulary parallel with the Kamba and Kikuyu is to emphasise the intimate relationship between the three languages. Swahili has become the trade language of East Africa: it is spoken at Zanzibar and all along the coast of both British and German East Africa, and the coast traders, travelling inland, have carried it into the interior. It is therefore highly improbable that an attempt to learn any of the native languages would be made without first mastering the rudiments of Swahili. In both the Kamba and Kikuyu languages the nouns are divided into a number of classes (being distinguished by the first syllable), and all adjectives, pronouns and
numerals are brought into relation with these nouns by corresponding changes of their first syllables. There is no class denominative of sex, though in each language there is a class which denotes animate objects. There is no article, definite or indefinite.