Maa Lesson #8: Simple Sentences #2

WELCOME to this lesson! We will expand on lesson #7 which focused on Maasai simple sentences. In this lesson, we will focus more on the grammatical structure of Maa.

Sentence Order: Maa takes a VERB – SUBJECT – OBJECT sentence construction.

• For example:
  • “Children love stories.” becomes “Love children stories.”
    • This translated into Maa = Enyor inkera inkatinin.

In this lesson, I will introduce some new pronouns and verb conjugations based on the present tense. I will also introduce some new vocabulary and then we will conclude the lesson with two translation activities. Pay close attention so that we can have the most success in the exercises at the end.

OKAY, ready?! Let’s begin!

Present Tense: (Including habitual and future)

• Pronoun prefix      +       Stem of Verb
  • a – ning.          =         I hear
  • i – ning.           =         You hear
  • e – ning.          =         he/she/it hears
  • ki – ning.         =         we hear
  • i – ning’ining’i.    =      you (pl.) hear
  • e – ning.         =            they hear
• Singular First Person:  a – nyor = I love
• Sing. Second Person:   i – nyor = you love
• Sing. Third Person:   e – nyor = he/ she/ it loves
• Plural First Person: ki – nyor = we love
• Pl. Second Person: i – nyorrinyorro = you (pl.) love
• Pl. Third Person: e – nyor = they love

Learn these words next: The plurals are in brackets.

• enkerai (inkera) = child
• inkatini (inkatinin) = story
• oltoilo (iltoiloshi) = voice
• ororei (irorei) = word
• aning = to hear, to feel
• anyor = to love, to like

**The articles “a”, “an” and “the” are implied in Maa.

Now that we have some basic understandings of Maa grammatical structures, let’s pratice a few translations exercises.

Activity #1: Translate these sentences into English:

• Aning oltoilo.
• Inyor inkera.
• Enyor inkera inkatinin.
• Kining iltoiloshi.
• Ening enkerai oltoilo.
• Ining’ining’i enkerai.
• Ening inkera irorei.
• Kinyor enkatini.
• Ining ororei.
• Enyor enkerai irorei.

Activity #2: Translate these sentences into Maa:

• We love words.
• The child loves stories.
• You (pl.) love the child.
• A child hears the story.
• We hear stories.
• I hear a voice.
• The children hear voices.
• I love a story.
• You love the word.

WELL DONE!! I hope this was a fun and engaging lesson on Maa simple sentences and grammatical structures. Happy continued learning!