I think you missed the time I posted about my linguistics professor who could act as, basically, a "Swahili room", but it's an interesting thing so I'll repeat it here.
Intro to Linguistics textbooks tend to have a good amount on Swahili, first because they figure it's a good basic introduction to the concept of agglutinating languages (and easy enough for linguistics 101 students to work out simple concepts on their own) but also, I suspect, because they think their students won't have much, or any, prior knowledge.
But what this means for my erstwhile professor is that, after years of teaching intro to linguistics himself with no TA, he could readily and easily cobble together Swahili sentences if you only gave him the parts. Couldn't speak the language, but so long as it's the sort of stuff that would appear in an introduction to linguistics course he could absolutely put them together in grammatically correct combinations. Which I know because he told us, and I choose to believe him.
That's also why I recognized that this was a plural form - I also can't speak Swahili, but I've spent enough time telling people about "noun classes", with Swahili as the obvious example language if you don't want people to remain hung up on their pre-existing notions of grammatical gender, that some of them have stuck in my head.
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Intro to Linguistics textbooks tend to have a good amount on Swahili, first because they figure it's a good basic introduction to the concept of agglutinating languages (and easy enough for linguistics 101 students to work out simple concepts on their own) but also, I suspect, because they think their students won't have much, or any, prior knowledge.
But what this means for my erstwhile professor is that, after years of teaching intro to linguistics himself with no TA, he could readily and easily cobble together Swahili sentences if you only gave him the parts. Couldn't speak the language, but so long as it's the sort of stuff that would appear in an introduction to linguistics course he could absolutely put them together in grammatically correct combinations. Which I know because he told us, and I choose to believe him.
That's also why I recognized that this was a plural form - I also can't speak Swahili, but I've spent enough time telling people about "noun classes", with Swahili as the obvious example language if you don't want people to remain hung up on their pre-existing notions of grammatical gender, that some of them have stuck in my head.