In my favourite isiZulu-English dictionary, there are a few valuable veins of vocabulary, or nodes. I’ve written about them before – amabutho, izinja, imibala, izinyoka, izinyoni, iziphoso, izinhlanzi and izihlobo are the main ones. Today, and for the past few weeks, I’ve been working quite closely with the first of these groups. I(li)butho has three […]
Tag: amabutho
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Word Route: Dábu
Dábu is an ideophone – a part of speech which in isiZulu has the rather usage-oriented name of ‘isenzukuthi’. What this means is ‘the thing that works using ukuthi’ – so-called because ideophones are used much like the English phrases ‘it goes bang‘ or ‘they always go pop like that’, where the ‘to go…’ is […]
uMabhengwane 