Izindza zisiza umpeki? (Olle)

Do you know what this means:

Izindza zisiza umpeki?

Of course you don’t. Unless you also happen to be a Secret Life of Languages student. Or maybe you’re a speaker of this specific South African language.  If this is the case (and I do realise the chances are very small) please get back to me!

This is what we do: we hunt and we gather. We hunt down the expressions – to even the smallest part – then we put the pieces together to form an enormous puzzle. Like any other discipline we add fancy pansy words to it, so no one understands. That makes sense, right..?

That’s why I walked away from the lecture today with words like ‘derivational morphology’ and ‘morphemes’ on my mind. Try to squeeze those two words into everyday conversation! It’s proven itself difficult so far, but I won’t give up that easily.

But there is something about languages that make me care. I don’t care about complicated equations or the periodic table (luckily others do). Strangely, I do care what Izindza zisiza umpeki? means. I think it’s curiousity, the fact you might miss out on something. I could just have insulted you, you know that right? It could mean… your mama’s mama, your mama’s mama… loose!

See, it’s interesting! I’m telling you!

Then again, I like random words. This helps.

Obamasising sounds quite hilarious, if you ask me. There’s more of them. Check them out on the web. We could even make up one now. Let’s see what we’ve got here. My day has been cilliterifying. To cilliter obviously means ‘to have a nice social day with plenty of surprises’. There you go, that’s how a new word is formed. Maybe it’ll prove to be a goldmorpheme (a made-up word which is only used once!). Tolkien must have had a blast!

Oh well, time for dinner.

By the way, since you’ve read this far, I’ll tell you what the above phrase means.

It means: the dogs are helping the cook.