"Are you traveling?"
Translation:Unasafiri?
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That's a very interesting and helpful comment on an aspect of the relationship between Kiswahili and Arabic. Thanks. I wonder why DL isn't, at the present, accepting "Mnasafiri?" which is an equally legitimate choice as "Unasafiri"? when the singularity or plurality is left to our imagination.
Unasafiri.
The verb is kusafiri "to travel" and the noun is safari "a trip, journey".
These are loanwords from Arabic and Arabic has a pretty complicated system of deriving words from each other not by just adding prefixes or suffixes but by changing (or adding/subtracting) the vowels between three consonants, as well as using prefixes and suffixes. You'll see a lot of Arabic loanwords in Swahili that have different vowels. This is a good example. Here's another.
wizara = ministry
waziri = minister
And quite a big family of words comes from the Arabic root k-t-b which has to do with writing. Here are some examples.
kitabu = book (the Arabic is kitab, with the plural being kutub, but in Swahili, the plural is formed the Bantu way: vitabu)
maktaba = library
katiba = text; constitution; declaration
katibu = clerk, secretary
mkataba = contract
So, basically, sometimes you might notice funny changes in the vowels in related words and if that happens, you're probably dealing with loans from Arabic.