There’s been a lot of this lately, in various different forms. Asinavalo. Abanavalo. Uvalo. For those of you needing clarification, here’s a short dissertation on the word. Firstly, it comes from a verb – uku-vala. The verb means the following things: close or shut suppress or deceive; bribe; bluff; cheat protect against evil or use […]
Tag: umbhudulo
I understand it now. When you’re faced with guilt, the automatic response is complete and utter denial. That explains Mr Shifty’s (aka Msholozi’s) actions of late. He’s issuing a programmatic response in accordance with this bit of wisdom, this isaga. Here’s how it works. First, icala (3.2.2-8.9): anything wrong, deserving of complaint; a defect. a […]
WARNING / ISEXWAYISO – NSFW / AkuVunyelwe emSebenzini In teaching someone a language, there are those discussions which step directly into (or onto) taboos – words for different forms of sex, heinous insults involving mothers and their pudenda, and this one, about excrement. There is no way to avoid the taboos, and I think that […]
Discrimination, segregation, Apartheid, xenophobia, prejudice, bias, racism, sexism, ageism, exclusion, stereotyping, profiling – this is a set of words tainted by many different instances of humanity’s only basic commonality, the urge to identify the other and be as horrible as one can possibly be towards him or her. Each of these words has a long […]
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 […]
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 […]
Categories
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 […]
Categories
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, […]
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 […]
Categories
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 […]
uMabhengwane 