Talk:yungali

yungali as a potential inflected form

though there is a morpheme -ngali- which marks the conditional past in Kiswahili, this word has an different meaning. What I cannot exclude as of now is that they have a common origin. The prefix yu- is found as a Class 1 marker though it is only found in semi-irregular verb forms such as yuko If any historical linguist of Kiswahili knows this please let us know here. Federico Falletti (talk) 12:25, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

@Tbm I've created this discussion in case someone knows the origin of this word. I'm pretty sure it's not an inflection (what you called "declination") of the verbal prefix -ngali- at least synchronically. It might have been diachronically however, I am not sure. The meaning of the prefix -ngali- is the past conditional – "would have" in English, which does not relate directly to the meaning of yungali in any obvious way. Thank you for the suggestion though, I hope someone that knows the answer to this will comment on here. Federico Falletti (talk) 12:32, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

There does indeed exist a copula-type verb -ngali (for which it seems we still lack an entry) that means “still, to still be the case that”. According to the grammar notes I have here, it conjugates with the prefix a-, though, not yu-:

Mwalimu angali ana wasiwasi

The teacher still has doubts.

So unless my notes are wrong (I can check other notes another day), this would mean that either yungali is some historical conjugation that has been fossilized, in which case we should be able to find attestation in other person/number/classes and I think we should treat it as a separate word in modern Swahili, or it’s a dialectal/sociolectal/whatever form of angali, in which case it should be listed as an alternative form thereof. MuDavid 栘𩿠 (talk) 07:17, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

I checked Mpiranya’s workbook, which gives yungali as an alternative form of angali in one example. I created -ngali based on this information. MuDavid 栘𩿠 (talk) 03:07, 9 November 2023 (UTC)