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incwadinsuku / daily blog izaga nezisho / proverbs and idiom Linguistics / ubuLimi umbhudulo

u(lu)valo

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 […]

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Linguistics / ubuLimi umbhudulo

umzimba (an umbhudulwana)

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 […]

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Linguistics / ubuLimi

izitho zomzimba (parts of the body)

As you grow up, you primarily learn the names of words for those things closest to you – your parents, things around the house, different relations, foods, animals etc. One of the vocabulary sets you almost unconsciously pick up contains words for parts of your own body. In English, this represents a dizzying array of […]