Voice on the left, with a loooooong excursus into isiZulu’s preference for the passive. Archaic transitive/intransitive switches in isiZulu, combined with more recent izimpambosi structures.
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Tag: Tutoring
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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Moods in Zulu
Example from lesson with Josh – Ubungathini? I parsed this as follows: U-be-{wo-}nga-THI-ni? The root of this predicative interrogative sentence is the following: THI, an irregular verb denoting to Say, Speak or Mean. Reading the particles of the verb as it is expressed, the following is the combined meaning: You-contingent-{remote}can-SAY-what? Translated as: What would you […]
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In other words
In the evenings, after work, my other job begins. I go to people’s houses all over Joburg, lugging a small black bag filled with dictionaries and books of proverbs, old grammar books and tattered notes. The people I visit are monolingual, largely, or at best they speak two languages from the Indo-European family, such as […]