Kinyarwanda is a fascinating language. There is a book I am reading, called A Tonal Grammar of Kinyarwanda, by a professor at one of the schools in the University of California system, which attempts to give a full description of the tone system in Kinyarwanda. To give an idea of just how complex tones in Kinyarwanda are, consider that this linguist took an entire 400-page book to describe how they work, not even dealing with other aspects of the language’s already-complicated grammar.
They are not complex in their number: it is just high and low. And it is not extremely often that entirely different words are distinguished solely by their tone, though it does happen. What makes them fascinating, and terrifying, is how completely they are integrated into the language’s morphology and grammar.
Some words get a high tone only when they are in the middle of sentences. Many verb tenses are distinguished only by tone. Some verb tenses flatten the tones that would have existed on the verb, some add new ones and some leave them untouched—and after having stared at them for quite awhile now, I cannot find a visible pattern to explain why.
That was what I spent the day doing (and what I have spent a fair number of hours doing since). I just read the chapter of the book called “The Assignment of Grammatical Tone,” which dealt with how tones are assigned in different verb tenses (what I briefly described in the last paragraph). It took 30 pages to get through all of them, and I even think he missed a few.
Even if we ignore the presence of tones in the language, the sheer number of ways verbs are distinguished is confounding. Kinyarwanda verbs distinguish not just tense (far past, recent past, present, future), but also mood (indicative, subjunctive, participial, conditional), aspect (imperfective, perfective) and often focus (whether or not a verb has some kind of complement appearing after it). And each tense appears differently depending on whether it is in a main or relative clause, and affirmative and negative verbs are different in a not-quite-consistent way. Plus, there are certain forms (still, not anymore, a narrative form) that might be considered tenses or moods, but do not quite fit into the other patterns.
Lots of languages make these distinctions; most of them even appear in English. What is really interesting about Kinyarwanda is that all of them involve prefixing, suffixing or mutating a single word. If you count up all of the options above, it comes out to about 100 or 120, which becomes even more overwhelming when you remember that the primary distinguishing feature is often a single high tone. Then, multiply that number by 16 possible subjects, several “verbal extensions” and then 16 objects that can appear multiple times depending on the nature of the verb, a single root can take literally thousands of different forms. There are certainly patterns to help out, but nevertheless it seems nearly impossible to keep a handle on all of them.
It’s times like this I cannot help but thinking, you know, I could have just learned French.
Speaking of which, French would be really useful, and I think I might well try to learn it. English is rapidly eclipsing it as the language of business in Rwanda and also in the world generally, but it would still be good to know. For one thing, any Rwandan over the age of 20—except those returning from Uganda—still speaks much better French than English. Also, most of the really good histories and academic works on Rwanda and on much of Africa are written in French, and that will take longer to change.
This extends to linguistic works as well. As I found very quickly looking in the Harvard Library, the number of English-language scholarly works on Kinyarwanda is approximately three, three of which are by the same author. As I learned talking to a Rwandan academic, these are not even that good relative to others. The really high-quality, comprehensive descriptions of the Kinyarwanda language, its grammar and its dialects are in French. (Increasingly, they are also in Kinyarwanda, which I think is pretty cool, but I am already working hard on that one.)
Perhaps I will make learning French a background project this year, in addition to all the other things I want to do—I know a good amount of the grammar already, and my Spanish is pretty good so hopefully it will come easily. Good thing I don’t have anything else planned for the coming year!
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