sotho

In Sotho there is a different approach whereby you have noun classes and they have concord with the rest of the sentence.

I've heard of school teachers teaching science in Sotho or Zulu that explain scientific terms in the local language.

As far as I know, the spelling of Northern Sotho is derived from German missionaries (though perhaps also influenced by Dutch).

This has caused Northern Sotho to be incompatible with English spelling.

It's obviously right between Southern Sotho and Shqip!

In fact, this principle is so well developed in the Northern Sotho language that you can even use the phrase for someone that is not in fact accustomed to you.

> There was a funny meme that essentially illustrated how different Sotho grammar can be, and how your figurative use of language can essentially hide meaning through ambiguity.

> [English is] not this way because of some essential superiority of the language This is an important point to me and something often misunderstood, even (and especially) by mother tongue Northern Sotho speakers.

The most common term would be "Sotho", but due to the confusion with Southern Sotho (a separate language) the default then instead becomes "Sepedi".

One reason might be that "Sesotho sa Leboa", which is the correct term for the language, Northern Sotho, is almost never used in verbal conversation.

In Sotho, the sentence "We will skin it with his knife" is written "Re tlo e bua ka thipa ya gagwe", while in the orthographies for Zulu and Xhosa, the same sentence would be rendered as "Retloebua kathipa yagagwe".

Getting back into learning my 3rd language: Sesotho/Southern Sotho, my wife's native language.

This is what has happened to the Sepedi dialect of Northern Sotho.

This is actually encoded into a common expression in Nothern Sotho.