“I’ve been doing Zulu at school since Grade 6. I’m now in Grade 11 and I don’t understand what’s going on in class. The class is taught entirely in Zulu, and we mostly just listen as the teacher reads from the set-work, translating word for word. I know I’m going to fail next year.” – […]
Category: isiZulu
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Today’s oddest isihloko
I tweeted this isihloko this morning: Ugibelise obephethe ikhanda lomuntu (She gave a ride to a person who was in possession of a person’s head). This definitely wins the “oddest story from today” prize. So here’s a précis/translation of the story (credit to Themba Ntshingila): Mrs Zwane and her husband, from Newcastle, were driving home […]
In trying to explain the way that words are modified ngesiZulu, I often find that the words that isiZulu uses for grammatical terms are far more useful than their English equivalents. The two words above both denote ‘suffixal change’, but they have completely different ways of getting there. isijobelelo – a suffix (literally the modifiable […]
Last week I began with -bomvu, only to be interrupted by the horrors of living in a world where a little girl can almost be raped by a man who’s only defence is that he’s drunk. I’m going to move on now, in the hopes that this will be somewhat therapeutic. Red is -bomvu, as […]
Just to be safe, I’m stating this up front – this is not a blog about the US spying on everything we do (although the principle is almost exactly the same). This is a blog about one of my favourite occupations as an undercover polyglot in South Africa, and about the flip-side of it: eavesdropping […]
Why is a wedding dress white (at least in modern western culture)? When someone’s in a black mood, what does that mean? If you call some ‘green’, how experienced are they? Colours mean many different things in different cultures, but most often that meaning is imputed by metaphor or analogy – so there are a […]
If you’re still willing to read more, there are three more branches to the isiZulu concept of ‘abuse’ (and possibly many more undocumented or as yet unfound, seeing as how abuse combines so many taboos, therefore having so much euphemism associated with it): potoza, cubhacubha & d(l)wengula Firstly, potoza. It has only one meaning: “press […]
Sad as it is to write about these things, they occur so commonly in SA society (and in the media) that NOT to write about them would be like praising the Emperor’s new clothes. So. Abuse. The English word is derived from Latin – abutor has two basic meanings: “to use up any thing, to […]
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Heart-based Relatives
I’ve already written about the inhliziyo, here, but while I was doing that (and while I was teaching yesterday) I rediscovered a set of 12 relatives derived from the the root word. If you know what a ‘relative’ is in isiZulu linguistics, skip to the list. Otherwise, stay tuned. A relative is one of four […]
You know why I was prompted to look this word up. You know what’s recently been in the news. This word is mentioned once in Vilakazi & Doke’s dictionary, and it is prefaced by (Mod.), meaning that in 1958 it was a ‘Modern’ term. Here’s what the entry says: a private lover (of either sex); […]
uMabhengwane 