Mpwitompwito

= pandemonium, hysteria.

A Romanian friend once put me straight about my language skills."You may know some words, Elaine, but you cannot speak Romanian." Now I'm tackling Swahili. I have a one-way Swahili-English dictionary nicked from school, a Lonely Planet phrasebook and people all around me speaking Swahili, in addition to the TV and radio. It shouldn't be that hard. You probably know more Swahili words than you think:
Safari=journey
Jenga=build
Titi= breast
Baisekeli you know
Pancha= puncture (I learnt that one early on)
Steshenimasta=stationmaster.
Bwana, in church Jesus is always called Bwana, which sounds fairly amusing.
I try to learn a few words a day, just flicking randomly through one of my books. The dictionary throws up some strange ones:
dongoa: lumps of dried mud falling from a wall.
matubwitubwi: badly cooked porridge and also mumps.
kindumbwendumbwe: children's game of humiliating one who wets the bed.
nyaraf: avoid contact with a person because of his filthiness/disgusting habits.
Even though Swahili is 100% phonetic, Lonely Planet includes phonetic pronunciation. So entries in its little dictionary read for example:
Mungu moon goo God.
The phonetic bit is in a different colour but it doesn't show up too well in the low light levels we often have here. So I confuse the last bit of the phonetics with the start of the definition. For example:
milele: mee-lay, lay forever,
kikapu: kee-ka, poo basket.
Quite a few words end in -ge so there's a whole chunk of pink lexis, eg
kidonge: kee-dohn, gay pill.
lengelenge:---gay blister.
bunge:---gay parliament.
ndege: ---gay aeroplane, leading to
kampuni ya ndege:---gay airline,
kizunguzungu cha saa kutokana na kusafiri kwa ndege:---gay jet lag.
Neatly, the word for gay itself ends in -ge,
msenge:---gay, gay, homosexual.
You can also see from this short selection how many dungudungu, katikati, pikipiki type words there are. Pilipili means pepper and pilipili hoho means chilli pepper. Pachipachi means the space in between two thighs. Hmmm! Talking of in between, Swahili grammar involves a lot of prefixes and infixes producing some very long words where it's hard to tease out the pronouns, prepositions and stuff. Or if you prefer: "Swahili has an agglutinating morphological structure." Er....right.
One good thing is that every word is stressed on the penultimate syllable as in Tanzania. Tanzanians themselves think that we pronounce it Tanzaynia.
For many Tanzanians Swahili is their second language anyway. The local tribe here are the Ngogo who speak Gogo. So, a lot of the kids I teach have had to learn Swahili, because Primary School is in Swahili, and then English, because Secondary School is in English (luckily for me). And if I attempt a few words of Swahili the whole class falls about laughing. Mpwitompwito!