In old Swahili tendi and homiletic poems about 50% of vocabulary is of Arabic origin (Bertoncini 1973), and besides single words, they include noun phrases or even whole Arabic sentences. In order to prove my point, I will discuss some verses taken from the Utendi wa Shujaka by one Hasan bin Ali from Lamu. The only extant manuscript of this epic poem in 295 stanzas was brought to Germany in 1854 by Ludwig Krapf and is kept in the Library of the Orientalistic Society in Halle. The poem is written in the Lamu dialect with many archaic features, like the incomplete palatalization of KI, the demonstratives in S- and others. But what is striking is the great amount of Arabic phrases and whole sentences, to the extent that we may perhaps speak of a case of code-switching. In fact, several verses of the poem cannot be understood properly without some knowledge of the main features of Arabic grammar, such as verb conjugation (both perfective and imperfective), verb forms (or classes), active and passive participles, noun inflection (masculine and feminine, broken plurals, construct state), personal, relative and possessive pronouns, prepositions and their combination with enclitic pronouns, numerals, conjunctions and particles, as well as word order.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa.de:bsz:15-qucosa-92657 |
| Date | 09 August 2012 |
| Creators | Bertoncini, Elena |
| Contributors | University of Naples `L`Orientale´, DSRAPA, Universität zu Köln, Institut für Afrikanistik |
| Publisher | Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | doc-type:article |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Swahili Forum 5 (1998), S. 27-40 |
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