Ticks and Clicks

I’m sorry about the lack of posts in the past few days, but I was a bit under the weather this past weekend. The students left on Friday morning and I was pretty tired that day so I just stayed in relaxing. Saturday Nick and drove east, passing through the town of Pongola, with the aim to get to St. Lucia on the coast so I could dip my feet in the Indian Ocean. Unfortunately there were hiccups, including myself feeling more and more tired and feverish, so we never made it out to the coast. Sunday was the same unfortunately, and I had so little energy I barely got out of bed. Monday they scheduled me an appointment with the doctor in town and I have now just arrived back in Klipwal from there. The doctor found that I have a case of Lyme disease, or as they like to call it here “Tick bite fever”, which I think sounds a lot more impressive and ominous. Turns out the two mosquito bites I had on my leg that were turning purple ended up being tick bites.

It’s nothing really to be worried about, but it does explain why I have had zero energy over the past few days and annoying aches and pains when I try to sleep. I’m on special antibiotics now and I should be back to normal as soon as tomorrow, so that’s good. It’s been extremely frustrating not being able to do anything fun or exciting over the weekend and just as frustrating not being able to go to work on Monday, but on the bright side I have been getting through a lot of Lord of the Rings. Yeah, I’m finally reading it.

I do have a little more insight on the Zulu language that I can talk about, as I have been picking up bits and pieces from Leonard and Phillimon as well as some of the students that came through last week. “Saubon” means hello and “yebo” means yes, for instance. I was very lucky though to be taught by one of the university students the intricacies of the clicking sounds used in the Zulu language. Like many of the African tribal languages spoken in South Africa (there are at least 9 different ones), Zulu uses clicking sounds in some of the words. Zulu uses three distinct clicks:

Version 1 is a soft click made by clicking the tip of your tongue just behind your two upper front teeth. It is soft but high-pitched, and there needs to be a decent amount of saliva behind your teeth for it to sound right.

Version 2 is a harder click but is still high pitched. It is made with the back of your tongue against the side or roof of your mouth, but your lips must be parallel and mouth slightly widened while making the clicking sound so it comes out as high-pitched.

Version 3 is a lower, deeper click that is performed virtually the same way as version two but with the lips slightly puckered to create the lower sound.

So there are some decent explanations of the clicks, but it can only really be done right when you hear them for yourself. A useful word that uses one of these clicking noises is the Zulu word for “sorry”. It is pronounced “KO-LEE-AY-SAH”, with the letter K here representing version 3 of the clicking noises. I’m not sure how it is spelled or how they represent the clicking noises in the alphabet yet, but that’s how it sounds. So “koliesa” for not posting in a while but hopefully I’ll be back to work soon with plenty more adventures to share!