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Sesotho Orthography
The orthography of the Sotho language is fairly recent and is based on the Latin script, but, like most languages written using the Latin alphabet, it does not use all the letters; as well, several digraphs and trigraphs are used to represent single sounds. The orthographies used in Lesotho and South Africa differ, with the Lesotho variant using diacritics. As with almost all other Bantu languages, although the language is a tonal language, tone is never indicated. For an overview of the symbols used and the sounds they represent, see the phoneme tables at Sotho phonology. :''Note that often when a section discusses formatives, affixes, or vowels it may be necessary to view the IPA to see the proper conjunctive word division and vowel qualities.'' History The original orthography was developed in the early 19th century by missionaries from the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society to aid in translating the Bible. The earliest orthographies were more like French spelling, sti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
South Africa
South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. Its Provinces of South Africa, nine provinces are bounded to the south by of coastline that stretches along the Atlantic Ocean, South Atlantic and Indian Ocean; to the north by the neighbouring countries of Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe; to the east and northeast by Mozambique and Eswatini; and it encloses Lesotho. Covering an area of , the country has Demographics of South Africa, a population of over 64 million people. Pretoria is the administrative capital, while Cape Town, as the seat of Parliament of South Africa, Parliament, is the legislative capital, and Bloemfontein is regarded as the judicial capital. The largest, most populous city is Johannesburg, followed by Cape Town and Durban. Cradle of Humankind, Archaeological findings suggest that various hominid species existed in South Africa about 2.5 million years ago, and modern humans inhabited the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Aaron Mokoena
Teboho Aaron Mokoena (born 25 November 1980), known as Aaron Mokoena, is a South African former footballer. He is currently the assistant coach of Cape Town City. Club career Early career Mokoena was born in Boipatong. He moved to Bayer Leverkusen and Ajax, before twice being loaned out to Germinal Beerschot and then transferring to KRC Genk for two years. On 4 January 2005, aged 24 he moved to Premier League side Blackburn Rovers in which he described his move as a dream. Blackburn Rovers Mokoena made his debut for Blackburn on 8 January 2005 in an FA Cup match against Cardiff City, coming on as a 43rd-minute substitute for Barry Ferguson. After this, Mark Hughes mainly utilised Mokoena as a holding midfielder. Mokoena went on to be a regular in the starting line-up for the remainder of the season, appearing 22 times in total. He was used by Hughes as the holding midfielder in a three-man midfield in a defensive 4–5–1 formation, a move which saw Blackburn concede few ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Niger–Congo Languages
Niger–Congo is a hypothetical language family spoken over the majority of sub-Saharan Africa. It unites the Mande languages, the Atlantic–Congo languages (which share a characteristic noun class system), and possibly several smaller groups of languages that are difficult to classify. If valid, Niger–Congo would be the world's largest in terms of member languages, the third-largest in terms of speakers, and Africa's largest in terms of geographical area.Irene Thompson"Niger-Congo Language Family" "aboutworldlanguages", March 2015 Austronesian has almost as many member languages, although this is complicated by the ambiguity about what constitutes a distinct language; the number of named Niger–Congo languages listed by '' Ethnologue'' is 1,540. The proposed family would be the third-largest in the world by number of native speakers, with around 600 million people as of 2025. Within Niger–Congo, the Bantu languages alone account for 350 million people (2015), or half ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Sesotho Verbs
Sesotho verbs are words in the language that signify the action or state of a substantive, and are brought into agreement with it using the subjectival concord. This definition excludes imperatives and infinitives, which are respectively interjectives and class 14 nouns. In the Bantu languages, verbs often form the centre of a complex web of regular derivational patterns, and words/roots belonging to many parts of speech may be directly or indirectly derived from them. Not only may new verbs be derived using a large number of derivational suffixes, nouns (and, iteratively, the other parts of speech that derive from them), some imperative interjectives and, to a lesser extent, ideophones may be formed by simple morphological devices. Varieties Verb stems may be divided into four varieties: #Regular stems beginning with a consonant and ending in a vowel #Monosyllabic verbs #Vowel verb stems begin with a vowel #Derived verbs constructed from other verbs, noun roots, adjectival ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Morphemes
A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this is the distinction, respectively, between free and bound morphemes. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. In English, inside a word with multiple morphemes, the main morpheme that gives the word its basic meaning is called a root (such as ''cat'' inside the word ''cats''), which can be bound or free. Meanwhile, additional bound morphemes, called affixes, may be added before or after the root, like the ''-s'' in ''cats'', which indicates plurality but is always bound to a root noun and is not regarded as a word on its own. However, in some languages, including English and Latin, even many roots cannot stand alone; i.e., they are bound morphemes. For instance, the Latin root ''reg-'' ('king') must alwa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Homograph
A homograph (from the , and , ) is a word that shares the same written form as another word but has a different meaning. However, some dictionaries insist that the words must also be pronounced differently, while the Oxford English Dictionary says that the words should also be of "different origin". In this vein, ''The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography'' lists various types of homographs, including those in which the words are discriminated by being in a different ''word class'', such as ''hit'', the verb ''to strike'', and ''hit'', the noun ''a strike''. If, when spoken, the meanings may be distinguished by different pronunciations, the words are also heteronyms. Words with the same writing ''and'' pronunciation (i.e. are both homographs and homophones) are considered homonyms. However, in a broader sense the term "homonym" may be applied to words with the same writing ''or'' pronunciation. Homograph disambiguation is critically important in speech synthesis, natural ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Phonemes
A phoneme () is any set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages contain phonemes (or the spatial-gestural equivalent in sign languages), and all spoken languages include both consonant and vowel phonemes; phonemes are primarily studied under the branch of linguistics known as phonology. Examples and notation The English words ''cell'' and ''set'' have the exact same sequence of sounds, except for being different in their final consonant sounds: thus, versus in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), a writing system that can be used to represent phonemes. Since and alone distinguish certain words from others, they are each examples of phonemes of the English language. Specifically they are consonant phonemes, along with , while is a vowel phoneme. The spelling of English does not strictly conform ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Chaka (novel)
''Chaka'' is the third and final novel by Lesotho writer Thomas Mofolo. Written in Sesotho, it is a mythic fictional retelling of the story of the rise and fall of the Zulu emperor-king Shaka. Following its first publication in 1925, it was published in English translation in 1931. Publication history ''Chaka'' was written in three years, from 1907 to 1910. To gather material for his novel, Thomas Mofolo made several trips to the South African province of Natal, including one in 1909 where he visited the grave of Shaka. The original Sotho manuscript was first submitted in 1910 to the Morija Sesuto Book Depot supported by the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society (PEMS), but was only published in 1925. The delay in publication was due to the publishers' being "disturbed by Mofolo's failure to condemn pagan tribal customs"; this led to a disheartened Mofolo's retirement from writing. According to translator Daniel P. Kunene, who translated ''Chaka'' from Sesotho to English, at l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Thomas Mofolo
Thomas Mokopu Mofolo (22 December 1876 – 8 September 1948) is often regarded as the first African novelist. His body of work, which consists of three books composed between 1905 and 1910, were first written in Sesotho, and then widely translated. He is best known for his third book, Chaka, a fictional retelling of the story of the rise and fall of the Zulu emperor-king Shaka. Life While Thomas Mofolo's work has been widely examined, his life story has been largely overlooked and no complete biography has been published. What is known stems from a short autobiographical sketch that appeared in 1930, the work of Daniel Kunene in the 1980s, and more recent archival research by the curator of Morija Museum and Archives. The third child of Abner and Aleta Mofolo, Thomas Mofolo was born in Ha Khojane, a village in the Mafeteng District of the British colony of Basutoland. His family were members of the Protestant church and remained loyal to the Cape Colony for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Sotho Parts Of Speech
The Sesotho parts of speech convey the most basic meanings and functions of the words in the language, which may be modified in largely predictable ways by affixes and other regular morphological devices. Each complete word in the Sesotho language must comprise some "part of speech." There are basically twelve parts of speech in Sesotho. The six major divisions are purely according to syntax, while the sub-divisions are according to morphology and semantic significance. As a rule, Bantu languages do not have any prepositionsSometimes a certain class of constructions are called "prepositions" in Sesotho, but this is merely a misunderstanding aggravated by the disjunctive Sesotho orthography. They are formed from adverbs of place by contracting the locative class' possessive concord (''ha-'') affixed to the following word into them (as evidenced by the fact that they all end with a high tone ''a'', and affect the tone of the following noun), and produce similar meanings to Engli ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Morpheme
A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this is the distinction, respectively, between free and bound morphemes. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. In English, inside a word with multiple morphemes, the main morpheme that gives the word its basic meaning is called a root (such as ''cat'' inside the word ''cats''), which can be bound or free. Meanwhile, additional bound morphemes, called affixes, may be added before or after the root, like the ''-s'' in ''cats'', which indicates plurality but is always bound to a root noun and is not regarded as a word on its own. However, in some languages, including English and Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European langua ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Sotho Concords
Just as the Sesotho sentence centres on the Sesotho noun, the noun is made to "concòrd" ("agree") with the verbs, pronouns, and qualificatives describing it by a set of Sesotho ''noun concords''. The noun concord system is the most striking feature of the Bantu language family. The exact number of concord types differs from language to language, and traces of this system (and the noun class system) are even found in some Niger–Congo languages outside the narrow Bantu branch. Concord types There are seven basic sets of concords.The actual number cited may vary from author to author. Some authors prefer to separate the prefixes used to form the demonstrative pronouns from the relative concords (possibly due to the phonetic transformations). Other authors (particularly in entry-level learner texts) treat the "auxiliary concord" as distinct from the subjectival. Some other authors do not seem to recognise the enumeratives as a separate part of speech and as such do not include th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
