Thursday, July 23, 2009

Ra reng ka pula?

Read below and click on the images that follow.

"Pula" is a Setswana word form which is used in Setswana to represent three related meanings.

1. It can be used to mean “rain” as in: Fa ba goroga pula e ne e na. (When they arrived it was raining.)
2. A cry of well wishing as in: Pula! Batho betsho!(Pula! Fellow people!)
3. Botswana notes as in: Ba batla o duela ka Pula fela. (They want you to pay in Pula only.)

A corpus analysis of the word "pula" reveals the following about types of pula (i.e. rain) pula ya medupe, matlakadibe, sefako, ntlha, tsheola, dikgadima, selemo, sephai, kgogolamoko, leebana, mariga, morwalela, ngwaga, ditladi, maebana.

How do Batswana characterise 'pula'. It appears this way: Batswana say pula e na, nele, tla, kgolo, namagadi, ntsi, tshologa, tshweu, tswa, boutsana, simolotse, tona, kgaotsa, bokete, phaila, porotla, rotha, tsorotla, utlwala, duma, goroga, ntlha, tsheola, dikgadima, selemo, tla, tshologa, simolola, mariga, matlotlo, morago, morwalela, ngwaga, ditladi.

There are also multi-word Setswana units which include proverbs and sayings:

* mosele wa pula o etšwa go sa le gale. *Nelwa ke pula * Maru ga se pula mosi ke molelo * Kgole ya pula e bošwa e bofologa * Pula ya medupe * Pula ya sephai * Pula ya maebana * Pula e tshweu * Pula ya tsheola * Pula ya kgogolamoko * Pula e namagadi.

Here are patterns of PULA showing words which typically occur before and after PULA contextually.

Here is a concgram for PULA. A concgram is "all of the permutations of constituency variation and positional variation generated by the association of a two or more words"


Here are some concordance lines of PULA.

4 comments:

Omphile said...

Ke a leboga, keep writing in Setswana and english about the language please. Puo ya bommaarona e a nyelela

Lebo said...

Re leboga go menagane. Thank you so much for your blog. We need more people to act to preserve our mother tongue, such a precious and unique language. It would be amazing if you could expand on the different types of rain and what kind of rain pattern is being described and when one is likely to have such rain ( global warming excluded)

thabo kganakgomo said...

re a leboga, this is one step to empowering our people with our language

Orateng said...

Pula enang fela e bo e feta