36 Comments
The English sentence needs a comma between morning and sister. The same goes for the other sentences of this same structure.
1137
Etymology (asubuhi)
From Arabic الصُبْح (aṣ-ṣubḥ, “the morning”).
Pronunciation
IPA: /ɑ.suˈɓu.hi/
Noun
asubuhi (n class, plural asubuhi)
morning
From Wiktionary:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/asubuhi
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Swahili_n_class_nouns
- 979
Do you know if Swahili <B>, <D>, <G> and <J> are always supposed to be implosive?
They are but more emphasis is placed on the context, i.e. the level of implosion varies with the context. Not sure if this helps, but if you can give an example I may be able to clarify further.
Even during review, this one always gets me (dada usually means "father").
I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I suspect he means in other languages, but there seem to be a lot of words associated with females in this list:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dada
They all seem to be traceable back to Persian though.
I also find this interesting:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%83%93%E1%83%94%E1%83%93%E1%83%90#Georgian "deda" (mother)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%83%9B%E1%83%90%E1%83%9B%E1%83%90#Georgian "mama" (father)
In English, babies call their Fathers "dada" so this is one to throw off us native English speakers :-D
right? literally imagine getting that one mixed up to a native speaker hahaha
I agree! I translated it as how is your morning sister.
Or How are you this morning sister
I suppose so. There is nothing that translates directly to good morning, the greeting in Swahili, it's just a question posed so any translation into English is what is meant. IDK.
Is it common for Swahili speakers to refer to their siblings as "brother" or "sister" when talking to them?
I want to know something guys is it right habari za asubuhi dada means good morning sister ? Please help because some of my local friends saying it should be good morning not how is the morning
- 455
The most common way to greet someone in the morning is habari ya/za asubuhi, so YES it is used as "good morning" is in English, but it means "news of the morning". I don´t recall ever hearing somebody say "asubuhi njema/nzuri" for "good morning". Plz do tell if you have heard it and where.
Couldn't you also say "How are you this morning, sister?" as another translation for this?
wasn't za used for plurals? + what's the difference between "the" morning vs "this" morning?
Yes "za" is used for plurals. The sentence literally translates to, "news of morning sister". There is no "a/an" or "the" in Swahili.
"news of morning sister". as in shouldn't it be "sisters" if it's za? [or can either 'news' or 'sister' be plural?]
As in news. Normally in English, news is uncountable. You will have to use something like "a piece of news " or "a news item " if you really wanted to "count" . "za" is qualifying "habari" and not "dada". I hope that helps.
More likely, someone from the USA would say "How are you this morning, sister?"
- 455
Hmm, sisi means "us" in standard (=tanzanian swahili) so if you talk to your sister about yourselves and say "sisi" it kinda makes sense, otherwise not. In Tanzania dada is the only word I have ever encountered for sister. Where did you hear sisi in Tz?
