Stories

  1. Tracking word shifts through corpus linguisticsWords rarely stay still. They drift in meaning, pick up new companions, and sometimes vanish altogether while fresh terms take their place. For lexicographers,…
  2. The Story of the Word Sekgoa and the English Language in SetswanaSetswana, one of the official languages of Botswana and widely spoken in the North West Province of South Africa, carries within its vocabulary a long record…
  3. Translating Scientific Terms into Setswana: A Practical GuideTranslating technical vocabulary into Setswana is rarely a mechanical swap of one word for another. Scientific concepts often carry centuries of Greek and…
  4. From Oral Tradition to Written Record: Collecting Setswana StoriesSetswana oral narratives have travelled through generations carried by the human voice long before any printed page existed. Elders in villages across…
  5. Setswana Terms for Kinship: A Complex System ExplainedKinship is the social spine of Setswana-speaking communities across Botswana, parts of South Africa, and Namibia. Long before modern schooling arrived in the…
  6. Why Example Sentences Matter in Learner DictionariesA dictionary definition can explain what a word means, but an example sentence shows how that meaning works in real communication. For language learners, this…
  7. How linguists determine the frequency of wordsWord frequency is one of the most useful measurements in linguistics. It shows how often a word, phrase or grammatical pattern occurs in a defined body of…
  8. Etymology of the Month: Meriting (Rain) and Its CognatesRain words often carry more cultural information than a simple weather forecast. They may encode seasonal knowledge, farming practices, ideas about blessing,…
  9. The Art of Translating Setswana Humor into EnglishHumour travels badly when it is treated as a string of words rather than a social performance. A Setswana joke may rely on a proverb, a familiar kinship role,…
  10. A Closer Look at The Setswana Word Go NnaFor English speakers, “to be” appears simple because English often uses one small verb to express identity, location, condition and existence. Setswana…