Hello everyone,
I'm a new comer who dares to publish here his first note in order to learn some Kikuyu. I'm a student in Language Sciences, and I'm very curious of Kikuyu, because almost each professor in my university who has studied the Kikuyu as their topics would add on a comment as "complicated" to this language; but on the same time they all confirm that it is a very interesting language.
If possible, may I know something fondamental about this famous language here? Please forgive me, by seeing that my questions seem so idiot.

1-Does Kikuyu a tonal language (or tone language)? How to represent the tone markers? Can I have an example in which I can see a pair of pronunciations in identic structure of consonants and vowels only distinguishing in tones?

2-Can I know something about the numerical system in Kikuyu? What are the most characteristique features according to you? By saying "one dog, two dogs, three dogs, etc." which numerals should I pay attention to?

3-In Kikuyu, how are nouns composed? Just like a kind of structure of "Prefix+Noun stem+Suffix"? And the adjectives will be placed before or after the nouns? In English one says "a big horse", and one can have the same words' order?

These questions may seem "weird" to most, but I really do not know this language and I want to have the opportunity of touching it by some entrances, I really appreciate your help which will be so kind to me.

I will give a short answer to the question on tones. The language is tonal in the sense that depending on the stress placement on a word, its meaning changes. In that sense, it's similar to Chinese tones. the problem arises in that there are no distinguishing marks to indicate which way the word is to be pronounced (i.e., which tone to use when)

Example. IRIA
Meaning: To Darken, to blacken (pronounced with a falling tone)
Riua niriiragia mundu

meaning 2: milk pronounced with a flat tone, rising at the last syllable

He mwana iria.

Meaning 3: Those ones, the ones, those things, etc. Pronounced with a high flat tone

I icio iratu iria nguugaga!

meaning 4. lake, ocean, sea ( Iria inene ria India) Pronounced with a low flat tone.

I have always thought that we should examine how we write the language as the system currently is woefully inadequate.

As you can tell, I'm no linguistic expert, but I hope this gets you somewhere...

I really appreciate your help, and I just began to work on this, so maybe I need some more help. Anyway, here, it is really a good place.

quote:

Originally posted by kanyonikanja:
I will give a short answer to the question on tones. The language is tonal in the sense that depending on the stress placement on a word, its meaning changes. In that sense, it's similar to Chinese tones. the problem arises in that there are no distinguishing marks to indicate which way the word is to be pronounced (i.e., which tone to use when)

Example. IRIA
Meaning: To Darken, to blacken (pronounced with a falling tone)
Riua niriiragia mundu

meaning 2: milk pronounced with a flat tone, rising at the last syllable

He mwana iria.

Meaning 3: Those ones, the ones, those things, etc. Pronounced with a high flat tone

I icio iratu iria nguugaga!

meaning 4. lake, ocean, sea ( Iria inene ria India) Pronounced with a low flat tone.

I have always thought that we should examine how we write the language as the system currently is woefully inadequate.

As you can tell, I'm no linguistic expert, but I hope this gets you somewhere...

quote:

3-In Kikuyu, how are nouns composed? Just like a kind of structure of "Prefix+Noun stem+Suffix"? And the adjectives will be placed before or after the nouns? In English one says "a big horse", and one can have the same words' order?

Kikuyu nominalization and modification is very different from English. Let us take conversion for instance. The template is to take a verb, prefix with the class 1 prefix [mũ] and replace the final vowel with [i]
e.g. nyua.....mũnyui
andĩka...mwandĩki
kama.....mũkami

In modification, the noun must always preceed the modifier. The logic is that Gikuyu agreement pattern relies on the class of the noun in question. You copy the noun prefix onto the adjectival stem. Hence unless you know the noun and its class, you will not be able to make the correct agreement.

This forum is great..teach us more