Mechanics of Zulu

Extra Zulu lessons offered to primary school pupils and first year Zulu 1 University students who have not studied Zulu at school

Zulu is a language which can be equated with the game of “stickle bricks” or “LEGO” we played as young children.
Nouns and verbs, amongst other parts of speech, consist of a beginning(prefix), a middle (a root or stem) and/or an ending(suffix). The middle or root remains the constant to a large degree and the prefixes and suffixes change according to specific needs of the noun and /or verb.

This explains the need for hyphens and explains the purpose of the hyphens in the construction of sentences.When looking up a word in the dictionary one often does not find what you are looking for because part of the “word” is in actual fact a prefix or suffix and the root is all that is indicated.

Language is constructed by stringing words together using different parts of speech e.g. nouns, verbs etc forming sentences which then enable us to communicate.
Zulu is a language that differs from English, and most other languages, in the way in which we construct sentences. In Zulu we need to ensure that the different parts of speech are in agreement with one another. This means when stringing nouns and verbs together we need to use a part of the one part of speech to ‘clip” onto another part of speech. These parts need to be in harmony or in agreement with one another.