Oshikwanyama/Owa uka peni

Chapter 7

Exercise 1
Construct a dialogue between yourself and a friend who you have not seen in a long while. This occurs at a hitch-point while waiting for a lift. Discuss where you are going, what you will do there, how things are at home, etc.

Grammar Corner: Coming and Going

“To come” and “to go” are expressed with similar verbs:

For the first person ame, it is written as follows:

In all tenses, for “to come”, if the last vowel of the subject concord is an a, it changes to an e. Thus, “He is coming” is said Ote ya and “He is going” is said Ota i. "He will come" is Ote ke uya. The u in uya is often left off, both in speech and in modern writing (Onde ya).

In addition, there are some more going-and-coming verbs:

In English, the word “return” can be used for both “go back” and “come back”, but in Oshikwanyama you must be specific.

Exercise 2
Translate the following statements into Oshikwanyama:


 * 1) Y’all come back now, y’hear?
 * 2) I am going back to America after two years. Tip: “After two years”, in this case, translates to konima yeedula mbali.
 * 3) I am from Angola.
 * 4) I am going to Zimbabwe.
 * 5) Where are you coming from?
 * 6) Go to hell.

OMUKWANYAMA TA TI:

~ Mweenda-nakanya iha puka. ~

A traveller with a mouth doesn't get lost.

(Ask directions.)

Grammar Corner: Noun Classes: Subject Concords 

At this point, we know the subject concords for people only – that is, only for noun class 1. The other noun classes have corresponding sets of subject concords, but only for the third person of course. In the table below, we organize the subject concords according to the noun prefixes:

There are also subject concords for stative verbs:

We will talk more about these later; for now you can concentrate on the present tense only. Not all of this is used all of the time – you will probably not master the past and future stative subject concords until at least a few months down the line. As we said before, they are only here in hope that they might be useful to you in the future.