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Learn Luganda
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Learn Luganda Pronunciation

A non-native speaker of Luganda will find that his Luganda is much more intelligible if he learns to handle pitch and length as integral parts of the language. 'Pitch' refers to height on a musical scale, and 'length' to duration in time. The surface units of duration are consonants and vowels, either of which may be single (short) or double (long). The surface units of pitch are three tones: high, low and drop. Learning to produce these units is relatively simple. What is not simple in this particular language is remembering when to use which tone. The purpose of this Synopsis is to pull together into one continuous whole all of the information that we have about pitch and duration. References back to the Synopsis are made at appropriate points throughout the Lessons themselves.

One way to describe the use of pitch and duration in Luganda would be to record the patterns used with each form of each verb and each noun, and with each sequence of two or more words, and then classify these patterns without attempting to state how they are related to one another. This kind of summary has in fact been done elsewhere, but the results have still been too complex to be of much immediate help to the ordinary learner. Our approach in this Synopsis will be to concentrate on the regularities that lie beneath the enormous complexity of the surface patterns.

One can predict the pitches and durations of any Luganda sentence if one has four kinds of information about it: (a) the vowels and consonants in each of the smallest meaningful parts of each word, (b) whether each mora (length-unit) is 'marked' or not: (c) the grammatical constructions within the sentence, and (d) whether each pause is at the end of a statement, or at the end of a yes-no question, or at the end of some other kind of question, or is somewhere other than at the end of the sentence. As one moves from this information to the actual tones themselves, it is useful to think in terms of some intermediate units, called 'word boundary'.