uMabhengwaneThe head is one part of the body that (linguistically speaking) has a wide range of uses. In English, you can use it, lose it, get it straight, listen to it (as opposed to your inhliziyo), or have something not quite right with it. The head of something is its leader, the top of it, […]
What do you mean in English when you talk about ‘a month’? If you speak a Teutonic language, it’s an easy association to make – ‘month’ comes from the root-word ‘moon’. In isiZulu, there is no disguising the word – izinyanga means 3 different things: Moons, Months & Herbalists (who are Moon-people possibly because of […]
I stand out. I’m over six feet tall, white, and I drive a bright red car. And 90% of my interactions during the average day here in Joburg are in isiZulu, not English. I gave up blending in long ago. Not blending in means that I’m asked a lot of questions. Some days the question […]
When you talk of courage ngesiNgisi, are you aware that it’s from the root word for ‘heart’? If you read my previous post on inhliziyo, you’ll realise that courage ngesiZulu doesn’t come from the heart. So where does it come from? Simply put, it comes from your liver. ngesiZulu, isibindi’s first meaning is ‘courage’ or […]
This is the first of a series of imibhudulo on the words for izitho zomzimba (see this post for the full list). If you don’t know what an umbhudulo is, you can either look it up in a dictionary or you can look here. umzimba, a noun from the static or elemental noun class, is […]
Think about the heart, if only just for a moment. What qualities do you associate with it? To which emotions do you link it? If you were inventing a language at this very moment, what sort of word would you invent for this most essential of organs? Inhliziyo is the physical heart (as an organ) […]
As you grow up, you primarily learn the names of words for those things closest to you – your parents, things around the house, different relations, foods, animals etc. One of the vocabulary sets you almost unconsciously pick up contains words for parts of your own body. In English, this represents a dizzying array of […]
There’s just too much to write about this week. I’ve looked over my Twitter TL, glanced through my notes from the week, and cast my mind back over my lessons – and there are so many avenues to explore. I could talk about the bad joke that started the week – “Dalindyebo, Mbeki and Magashule […]
It’s 5:25, and my last class of the day is about to end. Through the windows I can see the snake of traffic coiling red and orange down Rivonia, showing me the way home. No one has yet looked at their watch, but I’m aware that we’ve already crammed enough into this hour. So I […]
When I first explain this concept to speakers of English, their reply is disbelief – “how can it be that each place has a praise-name?” The answer to this question goes to the heart of much of the misunderstandings about land and place in South Africa, which I’ll touch on very briefly before going on […]
uMabhengwane