RWO: Have Your Cake, and Eat it Too

Jess writes:

Early on in our training, we learned an important distinction between the word for “chicken” and the word for “cake” in Zulu & SiSwati. “Chicken” is pronounced as “inkhukhu” in both languages, whereas “cake” is pronounced, coincidentally similar, as “khukhu”. Not really a big deal, right? I mean, it can’t be so bad to say, “I like cake” when you actually mean to say, “I like chicken”… could it? Well, it turns out that “cake” actually translates to mean something rather crude about female anatomy, so when our friend stated “I would like some cake” in Zulu, he was very quickly (and very frantically) corrected by one of our LCFs. Luckily, after being here for nearly a year, we have found that actual cake doesn’t seem to be such a popular thing in South Africa, so luckily we haven’t run into too many problems… but it’s still handy to know!!