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- "Dada na Rehema ni wapishi Wa…
"Dada na Rehema ni wapishi Watanzania."
Translation:Sister and Rehema are Tanzanian cooks.
February 20, 2017
10 Comments
DiegoJaviUnlam
1714
Wapishi (class II) is the plural for mpishi (class I).
Etymology (mpishi)
From the verb -pika (“cook”).
Noun
mpishi (m-wa class, plural wapishi)
1) cook (a person who prepares food for a living)
M-wa class
This class is also known as Class I (in the singular) and Class II (in the plural). It is used to refer to people almost solely; the two notable exceptions are mnyama (“animal”) and mdudu (“insect”), which both serve to categorise animate objects. These prefixes may be added to adjective, noun, or verb stems to express the idea that a person has that characteristic, like Kenya (“Kenya”) → Mkenya (“Kenyan”), or -gonjwa (“sick”) → mgonjwa (“sick person”).
From Wiktionary:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mpishi
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wapishi
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Swahili_noun_classes#M-wa_class
NattKullav1
207
"Sister and Rehema" sounds strange.
Does "Sister" here mean Rehema's sister or speaker's sister or listener's sister?
TemwekaC
339
I thought it would be Rehema's sister. In my native language (Chichewa/Chinyanja) "asisi a Rehema..." or "sister wa Rehema..." meaning Rehema's sister, and these languages are quite similar, so i just thought...
So if its the two of them, surely you'd start with the named subject like "Rehema na dada lake..."