Learning Luganda, part 1: So many syllables, so little time

Luganda, which is spoken throughout the southern part of Uganda in what was once the Buganda Kingdom, is not an easy language to learn.

The main obstacle to learning Luganda for most Muzungu here is that there are almost no books on the language whatsoever. The Muzungu who speak the best Luganda I have met yet are two British girls who live in my neighborhood, but they are struggling with the language as well. They were shocked to learn that I had found a book on Luganda, though there is still no dictionary in sight.

The book I have was published in 1951 by Oxford University Press. It portrays a language vastly different from the urban language of Kampala today with its various English cognates. Of the few complete sentences in the book, most describe life in the bush:

"The Hippopatamus chased the edible rat, but ate some weeds instead."

The vocabulary and antiquated phrasings are rarely useful for my day-to-day use of Luganda. But, what the book is great for is Luganda grammar. This has helped immensely.

Luganda is in many ways the polar opposite to Chinese, which is in the process of transforming from a monosyllabic language into a pollysyllabic one. It is often difficult for me to learn new vocabulary from people here because they treat entire sentences sometimes as words.

Take for example this: Nsanyaseokulaba (nice to meet you.) I learned this phrase last weekend, but my friend Deo who taught me the "word" could not seem to break it down to explain what it meant. He insisted it was one word for a long time, until I began to break it down into parts showing him what the English counterparts would be. Out of the challenge, I learned one new word, or part of a word, if you prefer.

N is the prefix for "I". (Verbs in Luganda are conjugated with prefixes.) Sanyase means "to be happy". Ku means "to", forming the infinitive of "laba" to see you. The "O" in the middle is the prefix for you in verb conjugations, though here it is being used in the objective case.

Therefore I read Nsanyaseokulaba as N-sanyase-o-ku-laba, or five seperate words.

This perhaps begins to explain the absence of a Luganda dictionary.