A few scattered observations on Sesotho

As you know, the Basotho of Lesotho speak Sesotho. I think that’s pretty obvious. However, occasionally the Basotho will host a moeti (visitor) who is a lekhooa (white person), and they (the Basotho) will have to teach him (the white person) how to speak Sesotho.

I have had a wonderful time learning Sesotho. I can’t say I am very good at speaking or understanding it in my actual day-to-day activities, but I sure enjoy studying it. Here are a few things I have learned and observed.

Demonstrative pronouns

As you know, we English-speakers have two demonstrative pronouns: this and that. As in “This? This here? This avocado is my avocado. If you would like an avocado of your own, you are just going to have to march yourself over there and get that avocado.”

In Sesotho, there are three demonstrative pronouns. They’ve got two that mean much the same as our this and that, but then they’ve also got a third demonstrative pronoun which means not here, not there, but even farther over there. I thought that this was an extremely silly notion (and was, incidentally, a little embarrassed and defensive that English has only two pronouns for demonstrating while Sesotho has three). But then I came across this passage in Bill Bryson’s Mother Tongue, a book about the English language: “Today we have two demonstrative pronouns, this and that, but in Shakespeare’s day there was a third, yon, which denoted a further distance than that. You could talk about this hat, that hat, and yon hat.” So I am glad that we do, in fact, have Demonstrative Pronoun Parity (DPP).

Noun classes

And yet, we don’t. Sorry. Sesotho nouns are grouped into fourteen noun classes: seven singular classes along with their respective plural ones. For example, for people, you have the singular mo- group paired with the plural ba- group: a single person is motho, while multiple people are batho. This is a nifty system for organizing, but also means that each noun class has its own accompanying suite of grammatical features. So when I say that there are three demonstrative pronouns in Sesotho, I mean that there are three for each noun class. But it gets better. This does not necessarily mean that there are 42 distinct demonstrative pronouns. Some noun classes, following no discernible pattern, share demonstrative pronouns with each other. For example, looking at the rough this equivalent, we have the plural noun class me- sharing the demonstrative pronoun ena with the singular noun class “junk” (more on this below). So I could have meroho ena (these vegetables) and nku ena (this sheep), but moroho ona (this vegetable) and linku tsena (these sheep). Here are some pictures for your further enrichment.

The “Junk” class

Bound up in the structure and vocabulary of any language is its history. With Sesotho, the most obvious example comes with the “junk” class. As you can see in the above diagrams, you can sort most of the other noun classes by their prefixes. A chair, setulo, goes in the se- group while bread, bohobe, goes in the bo- group. But the “junk” class is a free for all. While it no doubt contains words that have been in the Sesotho lexicon as long as bread and chairs, it is also the all-purpose receptacle for loanwords. So a quick look through the nouns that fall into the “junk” class reveals a large number of words (and by extension, the concepts/things they represent) that are likely recent additions to the Sesotho language and to Basotho culture. I can only readily identify those words that seem taken from English (though I’ve been fooled by false cognates before!), but you can see that things like kofi (coffee), oache (watch), and peneapole (pineapple) must have come from other languages and cultures fairly recently.

Ho tsela tsela kapa tsela hatselela

or

To cross a road or path six times

Another fun thing to note is the similarities between semantically related words. Is fun the wrong word? This is what I do while everyone’s watching Breaking Bad. Anyway, as you noticed while translating the above subtitle, the word tsela means both road and path. The action “to cross,” something that you often do with roads and paths (second only, I believe, to “walking/driving down them”), is also “tsela.” With a little tweaking, you can also see that “tsela” makes its way into the word for “six times” and also the standard “six” (tseleletseng). This is, I am told, because when you count on your fingers (using a standard human hand), you must cross from one hand to the other when it’s time for six.

Ha u e tsoara ke’eng?

To say that you have a headache in Sesotho, you say Ke tsoereke hlooho, which means basically “I am suffering [from the] head,” but translated literally means “I am touching [the] head.” The other day I was suffering from my head, and I told my class so, and one of my students, Rapelang, said something in response and everyone laughed. Later he explained to me that he had said Ha u e tsoara ke’eng? Playing off the literal meaning, this question translates to “Why aren’t you touching it?”

This made me think of the joke we have where you ask someone if his or her face hurts and then tell him or her that it is killing you. I told them about this joke and they laughed, but I’m not sure if they laughed because they understood it and thought it was funny or because I had told them it was a joke.