Taylor and Mbense: "Red dogs and rotten mealies" (1995)

There is a number of quite interesting observations in Taylor and Mbense's article on the concept of anger in Zulu.

First of all, when you're angry, your heart can be squashed like one squashes something soft (p 197-98). This is conceptualized with the word xhifi as well as the word fithi. Both mean the same thing.

Also, they note that anger is associated with nausea in Zulu. One can thus vomit from anger and if you meet an annoying person, your heart says "sick" (p. 199).

Further, being black-hearted or having a black heart in Zulu has nothing to do with depression -- it means either having literal nausea or being annoyed and irritable (p. 200).

This comes from a folk theory according to which the cause of irritability is black bile. One can thus provoke someone by splashing him with bile (p. 200).

Lastly, in Zulu, as well as in Hungarian, extreme anger is associated with being brought to tears (p. 207)

Afterthoughts on "The ANGER IS HEAT question"

Based on articles by Kövecses (2000), Yu (1995), and Taylor and Mbense (1995), Caroline Gevaerts gives the following report on the existence of heat metaphors for anger in languages other than English:

	HEAT	FIRE	FLUID
English	+	+	+
Hungarian	+	?	+
Japanese	+	+	+
Chinese	(–)	+	–
Zulu	+	+	(–)
Wolof	+	+	+
Chickasaw	+	?	–

It's difficult to say what to conclude from this table. Hungarian is definitely a biased pick, since Hungary has has a centuries-long exposure to Christian doctrines and scholarship. We should thus expect it to reflect the same humoral theory as English.

Chinese is, as Gevaerts notes, apparently a counterexample to the theory. The central metaphor, ANGER AS HEAT, does not seem to occur.

Anyway, here's my to-do list for today:

1. Finish research on blindness, deafness, and physical disability
2. Make a list of the arguments I've written so far and think about the ordering
3. Contact the two corpus linguists that Martin put me in contact with
4. Read some more of Feldman's From Molecule to Metaphor (2006)