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 […]
Category: umbhudulo
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); […]
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Use your head!
The 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, […]
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) […]
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izithakazelo zendawo
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 […]