There’s a verb stem that seems, strangely, to be on everyone’s lips. It’s strange because the stem has, up until recently, only been used in religious or political contexts – but now it’s used to talk about a particularly virulent form of intergenerational transactional sex. Here’s a riddle for you – how are State Capture, […]
Category: Linguistics / ubuLimi
I folded the A3 sheet into 8 rectangular sections, and laid it out in landscape – 4 on the top and 4 on the bottom. I arranged four different coloured pens, each for a specific aspect of the exercise. And then, from memory and from various sources scattered around the room, I began to fill […]
This post is the second part in a series on gender or ubulili ngesiZulu. Please read the first part if you’re lost at any point. The essential word for human is umuntu. Though it has a related connotation of African human, it is the most generic word. From it are derived the word for child […]
This is the first part of a three-part series on Gender ngesiZulu, which is something I’ve recently been researching for two different friends. This is an ancient or ur-Bantu root meaning ‘bed’. It’s very different from the word u(lu)cansi, meaning ‘sleeping mat’ or (euphemistically) ‘sex’. There are no cognates of -lili meaning ‘bed’ specifically. This […]
There’s been a lot of this lately, in various different forms. Asinavalo. Abanavalo. Uvalo. For those of you needing clarification, here’s a short dissertation on the word. Firstly, it comes from a verb – uku-vala. The verb means the following things: close or shut suppress or deceive; bribe; bluff; cheat protect against evil or use […]
The idea of choice is at the heart of an election. E-leg-ere is a Latin verb, meaning ‘to pick out’ or ‘to select’ from a list of candidates. And the Zulu verb uku-khetha means exactly the same thing. I’ve spoken about it before, I think. I should have, at any rate – my darling wife’s […]
I posted this on FB recently, and there has been some debate. I offer it now to the wider internet. Let me know what you think. Um, in my humble opinion there are a few issues with this poster. 1. I-Johannesburg isn’t a thing. I know that you might be meaning to say ‘Johannesburg Metro’, […]
I’ve been pondering how to phrase all this for some time now, but finding a way in is tricky. Previously, when I voiced some of these thoughts to my sister-in-law, I was met with the inevitable “don’t you think you’re just being paranoid?” Well, maybe I am. You see, you may not even notice any […]
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Numbers
I was humbled to read the awesome work done in Xitsonga about Mathematics Terminology, and inspired to write this blog. I’m still researching different ways of talking about geometry and rates of change, but numbers are things with which I am familiar. I teach the same lesson in many different ways, depending on whom I’m […]
I just read that the SABC will no longer show footage of violent protests. I almost have no words. I understand that there might be issues around showing violence in general, but there is also the imperative to report accurately on what is happening in South Africa every day. It happens in many many parts of […]
uMabhengwane 