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English missionary Henry Hare Dugmore helped translate the Bible into Xhosa in 1859 Nelson Mandela was a Xhosa and was a member of the royal family of the Thembu tribe. Xhosa-speaking people have inhabited coastal regions of southeastern Africa since before the 16th century. They refer to themselves as the amaXhosa and their language as isiXhosa.
While the Xhosas call their language "isiXhosa", it is usually referred to as "Xhosa" in English. Written Xhosa uses a Latin alphabet–based system. Xhosa is spoken by about 18% of the South African population, and has some mutual intelligibility with Zulu, especially Zulu spoken in urban areas.
Indodana" is a traditional isiXhosa song which has been arranged for choral performance by South African composers Michael Barrett and Ralf Schmitt. [1] [2] [3] The lyrics, translated into English, are: "The Lord has taken his son who lived amongst us / The Son of the Lord God was crucified / Father Jehovah". [4]
The traditional isiXhosa names for months of the year poetically come from names of stars, plants, and flowers that grow or seasonal changes that happen at a given time of year in Southern Africa. The Xhosa year traditionally begins in June and ends in May when the brightest star visible in the Southern Hemisphere, Canopus, signals the time for ...
Literal English translation will align it with "-ness" (a.i. hardness, stubbornness). An example is: "hardegat-geit" (lit. hard-arsed and cocky). gham – A word to describe someone that acts out in an uncivilzed manner, or refer to lower class person. (other words would be "tappit", :kommen: or when someone is gham it portrays them as being ...
At least thirty-five languages are spoken in South Africa, twelve of which are official languages of South Africa: Ndebele, Pedi, Sotho, South African Sign Language, Swazi, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu, and English, which is the primary language used in parliamentary and state discourse, though all official languages are equal in legal status.
A speaker of the Northern Sotho language. Sesotho sa Leboa is a Sotho-Tswana language group spoken in the northeastern provinces of South Africa, most commonly in Mpumalanga, Gauteng and the Limpopo provinces and Botswana [4] It is also known by Pedi or Sepedi and holds the status of an official language in South Africa.
More information on the song can be found in Makeba's book The World of African Song (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971), including the following translation: "The doctor of the road is the beetle / He climbed past this way / They say it is the beetle / Oh! It is the beetle."