How do adjectives work in Zulu?

[Marci.99]

I attempted to google my question in a few ways but with little success.

For example, enkulu, elikhulu, esikhulu, omkhulu, amakhulu and ezinkulu all mean big. When it's the difference between singular and plural, I can still see that there is a pattern like with "indlulamithi enkulu" and "izindlulamithi ezinkulu". Or that the prefixes of adjectives tend to match the noun, like with "isilwane esikhulu". However, I don't really know how to use it and if these are at all exchangeable.
On that note, since I chose the word "big" as an example, is there a reason that in some words the main part of the word is "-kulu" and in others "-khulu"?

[taversham]

Zulu has multiple noun "classes" - these are similar to "gender" in European languages, because you have to conjugate adjectives differently depending on the class of the noun. In Zulu this conjugation is normally called the "concord". This is done through prefixes in Zulu rather than with suffixes as you find in French/German/etc, and there are 8(ish) noun classes in Zulu rather than the 2/3 genders you find in European languages.

https://easyzulu.weebly.com/noun-classes.html is a good introduction to the noun classes, and explains how the plural forms are different.

https://easyzulu.weebly.com/adjectives.html is a good description of how adjectives

And https://easyzulu.weebly.com/concords.html goes into the conjugations/concords. That site also has good descriptions for other aspects of the grammar

[Marci.99]

Thank you, I was not aware of this website but it seems very helpful!!

[SarahT]

Another wrinkle is that isiZulu has, as far as I can tell, a relatively short list of stems that are formally classed as "adjectives". -khulu (large) is one of them, you make the actual adjectives by adding "adjective concords". (I'm sure there's a simple rule for when you drop the h in -khulu but I haven't figured it out yet.)

There's also a group called "relatives", and that's the bigger group, it includes words like "-bomvu" (red) and -nomsindo (loud). Relatives have a slightly different set of concords (there is some overlap with the adjective concords so some of them look the same). I think you just have to memorize which are adjectives and which are relatives. I haven't yet figured out if Duo uses any sentences where this would be noticeable.

...and then there's words like "ophithilezayo" (the one who is busy?) and "odlule" (the one who passed?) which seem to be derived from verbs, but this is hard for me to figure out because those words don't appear in my student dictionary.