uMabhengwaneThe people of this continent have long been working with metal, as people have in many other parts of the world. The smelting or shaping of metal was often regarded as a sacred and magical act, and is the source of the modern sciences of chemistry and metallurgy. Those who smelted the metal, the Hephaestuses […]
There are three ideophones involved in the fullest understanding of both the general idea and the two distinctions of the concept of ’emotion’ in isiZulu – háwu, hawu (6-3.3-9) and hawu (6-3.9). Háwu! is an ideophone denoting emotion. It gives rise to all of the different nominal (2) and verbal (4) derivations dealing with emotion. […]
When one language comes into contact with another, the collision or contact results in certain changes – new words are adopted from either side of the binary, usually to represent concepts that didn’t occur before the contact. In the case of isiZulu, the verb ukusonta is one of them. Ukusonta means ‘attend a Christian religious […]
I promise I’ll get back to the report after this. I just can’t resist. The amaZulu call this month uNhlangulana – the little-scatterer. Another name might be the-little-shiverer-one-sneaking-in-under-doorways (to be warded off, e.g. ukuhlangula induku means ‘to ward off a blow in a stick fight’). The name of the month and of the wind that […]
Does an etymological difference make any difference to the perception of a thing? This is the question I drove home with after Thursday morning’s lesson with Paul. I had introduced a discussion I’d begun with Claire, about the etymology of the word ‘economy’ and its isiZulu translation ‘umnotho’. ‘Economy’ is traditionally derived from the Greek […]
On Thursday mornings, I teach Paul – though sometimes he ends up teaching me about by-elections or Hebrew grammar or pivot tables. This last Thursday, following the hype around the Umzimkhulu by-election (in isiZulu, ukhetho lokuchibiyela or ‘the election of filling in the gaps’), we ended up translating the names of KwaZulu-Natal’s municipalities (which isn’t […]
I was just getting into my stride for the morning. I had woken, we had sent the kids to school and I had remained and gathered up the scattered remnants of izolo. I had sat down at my computer, the blinds open, about to start my day. And then my friend Mjo Zungu (Manzini!) smses […]
As usual on a Thursday, I popped in to the Caltex in Cyrildene to buy Isolezwe on my way back from my lesson in Yeoville. It was beautiful driving down the avenues, with plain trees and liquid ambers scattering themselves over the road in the tentative autumn morning light. With the headlines staring at me […]
These things make a bit more sense in the light of day than they did at 6 this morning. Locative Demonstrative Copulatives, or LDCs, do not occur in English. They don’t occur in any of the Indo-European languages, as far as I’m aware. They are the strange chimeric offspring of Demonstrative Pronouns and Copulatives, and […]
For those of you reading this who know what Noun Classes are in terms of isiZulu, you can skip the next paragraph. For the rest of you, read on. For a list of the different blogs dealing with specific nouns in each isigaba, go here. Many languages classify nouns. Indo-European languages like German, Latin, Sanskrit […]