Today, the last in the month of uMandulo, there are people marching against corruption. They are marching in all the major centres of Mzansi. Elsewhere I have spoken about the connection between forgetting, deception and corruption. It is a complex dance of backward glances, envelopes under the table and vocal dissimulation, designed to perpetuate an […]
Tag: linguistics
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O- (12 iziqu)
ngesiZulu, very few iziqu (word stems) begin with the sound ‘O’. The sound is used very often elsewhere in the language, as it the result of a coalescence of ‘A’ and ‘U’ and it is the prefix for plurals of all names, many family members and some borrowed titles (like omama, ogogo, othisha etc) – […]
In trying to explain the way that words are modified ngesiZulu, I often find that the words that isiZulu uses for grammatical terms are far more useful than their English equivalents. The two words above both denote ‘suffixal change’, but they have completely different ways of getting there. isijobelelo – a suffix (literally the modifiable […]
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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. […]
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 […]
These things make a bit more sense in the light of day than they did at 6 this morning. Locative Demonstrative Copulatives, or LDCs, do not occur in English. They don’t occur in any of the Indo-European languages, as far as I’m aware. They are the strange chimeric offspring of Demonstrative Pronouns and Copulatives, and […]
My wife’s sms comes through mid-morning: how would you define an ideophone? I imagine the conversation diverging from the task at hand, the English teachers (supposed to be) discussing next term’s syllabus and sharing out the work for it, and the sudden foray into isiZulu linguistics. I try to figure out what the best approach […]
What kept the owl quiet these past four weeks? Why were there no bits and pieces of linguistic weirdness occasionally scattering across your screen? ngenxa yomsebenzi-nje. because of work. Which is a good thing. uMasingana, the isiZulu name for this month, relates to the verb singa, meaning ‘to look about, to peer out of a […]
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*thi and its routes, again
Thi and its routes, again. “…bakhona abanohlelo oluTHIze…” There are people with certain ‘agendas’, as opposed to ‘plans’, …as part of a conversation between uKhozi FM’s political analyst and the Vuka Mzansi presenter, Linda Sibiya, Mr Magic. The relative (a type of qualificative word in isiZulu – adjectives, relatives, enumeratives and possessives all ‘qualify’ the […]
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*hlung {word route}
There are two separate ideas that converge in this word, along with the strange shapes that they make with your mouth when you say it. The first idea is that of ‘winnowing’ or sifting, from the ur-Bantu stem -ĸuŋga, meaning ‘sift’. And the second centres on what I would argue is the nominalised form of […]
uMabhengwane 