Happy St Patrick’s Day! Make sure you’re wearing into eluhlaza! Blue-green conflation is what I like to call it. Others prefer ‘confusion’ rather than ‘conflation’, and still others talk about ‘Grue’ languages – ones that do not have separate words for those two colours. What matters to me is that my students almost universally react […]
Tag: colour symbolism
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 […]
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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
uMabhengwane 