WARNING / ISEXWAYISO – NSFW / AkuVunyelwe emSebenzini In teaching someone a language, there are those discussions which step directly into (or onto) taboos – words for different forms of sex, heinous insults involving mothers and their pudenda, and this one, about excrement. There is no way to avoid the taboos, and I think that […]
Category: Linguistics / ubuLimi
Categories
uzifihlephi?
When I’ve been scarce, as I’ve been these past months, this is the first question I am asked. It’s quite a complex little word, and as is usual with isiZulu it conveys a complete sentence. Here’s how it works. u-zi-fihl-e-phi? you-yourself-hid-past-where? where have you been hiding yourself? The first syllable is a low tone, an […]
Discrimination, segregation, Apartheid, xenophobia, prejudice, bias, racism, sexism, ageism, exclusion, stereotyping, profiling – this is a set of words tainted by many different instances of humanity’s only basic commonality, the urge to identify the other and be as horrible as one can possibly be towards him or her. Each of these words has a long […]
You may know him by many different names, some more flattering or familiar than others. JGZ. JZ. Jacob. Msholozi. (Dis)honourable Mr President. In my classes, many of my students ask me what his name means, and it’s a side-track on which I am happy to embark. So let’s have a look. Jacob. Biblical Name. Treacherous […]
There is a vast collection of izaga about success and failure ngesiZulu, and these are some of the most common of them all (and some of the most figurative). Luck, misfortune, unsuccesful attempts, impossible feats, failure, despair, uncertainty and rivalry are all discussed in this part of the izaga. The first section of these proverbs […]
When it comes to wisdom about relationships and enmity, isiZulu has a total of 94 separate proverbs to use in almost every situation. These are some of my favourites, and I particularly enjoy teaching my Class 10s about threats and grudges. In fact, I could write a whole post just about the 24 common proverbs […]
When one talks about ubuntu, it’s easy to swallow the final few drops of euphoria left over from the Rainbow Days and drift off into a reverie where everybody loves each other and we are all free and honest and tolerant and forgiving. There might even be enough of it to drown out the smell of […]
In the Inqolobane yesizwe, by Nxumalo and Nyembezi, there are 41 different categories of proverbs in isiZulu. 41. Just think about that for a second. The 41st one is ‘miscellaneous’. It alone has 100 different proverbs. There are 929 proverbs collected in this one book. This list is not exhaustive, at all. And all of […]
There are two very common verbs in isiZulu which present a number of problems to first-time speakers – ukukhohlwa and ukukholwa. As you can see, the first problem is that they look and sound very similar to one another. For those of you with a bit of isiZulu under your belts, you will probably also […]
My head’s a divided place. Sometimes I imagine that there are bulkheads, water-tight and riveted securely in case of icebergs and other acts of god. There are valves and ducts connecting the bulkheads, but otherwise they are separate. They tend to follow the same pattern, with minor variations according to the different specifications – some […]