Sitting here scraping away the last vestiges of bright pink and orange from around my nails, I realise that I’ve neglected this space for a bit. I think it’s okay, though, because land and sheets of paper (however metaphorical or metaphysical) need to be left to lie fallow every once in a while. The cane […]
Category: isiZulu
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Nodes
Look up the following words in a good isiZulu-English dictionary (I’m very subtly suggesting Doke & Vilakazi): i(li)butho; isihlobo; inyoka; inyoni (both under nyo-); umbala (under ba-); umkhonto; inja (under nja); & isiphoso Before I save you the trouble and give you the answers, let me tell you why you meed to look them up. […]
s’khath’sin? It’s a common enough phrase for someone to hear in Joburg. Most people know what it means, especially if it’s accompanied by the usual hand movements, and the tapping of the left wrist. Isikhathi means ‘time’. It also means ‘watch’. Hold that thought. Most people have their specific opinions around time, and particularly ‘African’ […]
There are only 150 words on the page this morning. It’s 7 am, and the translator for a national retail chain has let them down. The day before was a public holiday. And the day before that was Sunday. One can’t really expect someone to act like a professional over a long weekend and get […]
It’s been a busy week so far – a 3500-word backtranslation and two sets of radio scripts for a retail chain, in between the usual paths of public holidays and normal weekdays teaching around Gauteng, landing without a sound at a creative and refreshing hour’s lesson with Mr Thursday in Yeoville (after a late night […]
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Hláka – Word Route
Sometime this week, I was listening to Ezisematheni (stories-on-the-saliva or on-the-tip-of-the-tongue) when I heard the following phrase: i-NFP iyahlakaza izinhlaka ezintsha e-KZN the NFP is hlakaza-ing new izin-hlaka in KZN So of course my first thought was this: there must be an ideophone lurking at the heart of both those words. And I was right. […]
The following is a list of words derived from nouns in the ulu- / izin- Noun Class (which I call the Concepts NC). Some of them are Relatives (descriptive things used to draw a relationship between a noun and something else), while others are Adverbs (descriptive things used to enlarge on or modify verbs). Read […]
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Heavy Metals
The 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 […]
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Háwu!
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. […]
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Hidden isiZulu – ukuSonta
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 […]
uMabhengwane 