http://www.randomhouse.com/features/mccallsmith/books.html
I sent this message to the reading group several weeks ago, a quick and dirty pronunciation guide to the Setswana words in the book:
This newsletter from Botswana Tourism mostly is promoting their safaris...but the third page details the kind of food most Batswana eat and drink. Even mopane worms! Check it out...For those of you who like to have some sense of how foreign words are pronounced while reading them, I thought I would pass on some pronunciation tips for the words in Setswana (the language of the people of Botswana). I spent a year and a half there in the Peace Corps starting in 1972 (and still remember some things). I was teaching in Mochudi, the large village where Precious was raised and where she wanted to retire.A bit about meaning...Mma and Rra mean something like ma'am and sir, or Ms/Miss/Mrs. and Mr. when they precede a last name, like Mma Ramotswe.Botswana is the country.Setswana (or Tswana) is the language.Motswana is one person from Botswana.Batswana is all the people from Botswana.Pronunciation:Mma...just prolong the M sound.Rra...a trill.Gaborone, the capital city where she lives, an hour's ride from Mochudi:"The g is pronounced as a throaty h sound similar to the ji in fajita" (from Wikipedia)and the last "e" makes another syllable, so it sounds like "Ha ba RO nay" (think ma ca RO ni with a 'nay' at the end.The South Africans called it Gaborones (hard G, three syllabales) when I was there.Other towns also have that last syllable with the final -e.Lobatse= Lo BA tsayMolepolole= mow lay poe LOW layMaun, in the north near Francistown, is two syllables: ma OON.The ts in the family of Botswana words is tricky...try saying t and s at the same time. T is a 'stop', a 'plosive', where you are stopping the air very briefly (like t/d/p/b). So it's like an explosive s...hehehe. The ts are pronounced together.So the way we would probably pronounce the country is like Bots WA na.But more accurate is... Bow TSWA naThe tsetse fly... tsay tsay.Here's the wikipedia page for the language. I recognize many of these phrases...
http://www.botswanatourism.org.uk/content/pdfs/dikgang-14.pdf
Millet is grown and pounded into (mealie) meal in villages everywhere. I can get millet bread at our local Whole Foods store, I guess for people avoiding wheat, and for those who like the taste and consistency. Batswana eat it in porridge, like Italian polenta, with meat and onion stews, and with lots of ketchup as sauce. Or at least they did in 1972, hehehe. Yum. I can't wait to see what the book club members will bring to eat, an activity almost as important each month as discussing the book. I'm bringing dessert...not something I remember very well from my days there, but fun to buy/prepare.
My sister-in-law Melanie Peppin Rock gave me three of McCall Smith's other books, beginning with Portuguese Irregular Verbs - A Professor Dr von Iglefeld Entertainment
Alexander McCall Smith, Polygon, 2003. Another in the series is The Finer Point of Sausage Dogs, also spoofing the absent-minded professor and the world academics inhabit. Good stuff; I read them recuperating from surgery in April, so I really need to look again.
