That was so cool! It brings up so many questions to me -- like do you feel you have a passive understanding of lots of different languages, and are the phonetics the same trying to read the signs in different languages? Even in English, trying to teach my daughter to read, it's just mindboggling trying to explain to her how the "f" sound is made by "f", "ph" and "gh" (as in laugh, but not in fight!)
do you feel you have a passive understanding of lots of different languages Me, personally, no--but I'm a very poor example. All South Africans should be at least bilingual by the end of high school and, after years of study and my teachers' best efforts, I am fluent in...um, English. *blushes
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Very cool! I'm fascinated by the fact that (based on the word for thank you), some of those languages appear to be similar and/or related. It's also useful that they can all be rendered in Roman script.
Several of them are related. Xhosa, Zulu, Ndebele and Swati belong to the Nguni group. I'd have to check, but I think the speakers of those languages were all originally one cultural group that sub-divided. And Tswana, Sotho and Sepedi (also called Northern Sotho) are related, according to Wikipedia.
As far as I know, the written forms were developed by the colonists, who just found a way to make the sounds fit Roman script (like assigning 'c', 'q' and 'x' to the Xhosa click sounds). The cultures these languages belong to have rich oral traditions, and fascinating things like messages conveyed by beadwork patterns, but I don't think any of them had coded their language into a written script before the missionaries et al arrived.
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Me, personally, no--but I'm a very poor example. All South Africans should be at least bilingual by the end of high school and, after years of study and my teachers' best efforts, I am fluent in...um, English. *blushes ( ... )
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As far as I know, the written forms were developed by the colonists, who just found a way to make the sounds fit Roman script (like assigning 'c', 'q' and 'x' to the Xhosa click sounds). The cultures these languages belong to have rich oral traditions, and fascinating things like messages conveyed by beadwork patterns, but I don't think any of them had coded their language into a written script before the missionaries et al arrived.
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