In this third and final instalment of our mini-series, we delve into the ancient etymology of animals that have lived long with mankind but were never – and perhaps could never be – domesticated. Instead, these animals would raid farms and settlements to feed on the domesticated animals themselves, or decimate field crops and stored grain. In typical fashion, all etymologies show off Setswana as a true protolanguage whose etymons echo even in supposedly unrelated language families.
Let us begin with the fox. This stealthy creature is well known across all cultures as a notorious raider of chicken and small stock. It slyly evades traps to get its plunder, leaving the irate farmer to later count his losses. Indeed, a fox’s raid seemed like the very visitation of a phantom, hence its ancient association with ‘an invisible gust’: a foko or phoko. Evidently, ‘fox’ was once pronounced foko-je (‘phantom eater’), and thus shared an ancient common etymology with Setswana’s phoko-je. This evident association is, of course, opaque to linguists who regard the biblical Tower of Babel incident in Genesis 11 as pure myth, but I will continue to unearth traceable vestiges of the still-discernible protolanguage described therein.
