On the contrary, and just as Genesis 11 avers, I have unearthed remnants of a global protolanguage we all spoke as recently as the Neolithic (post–Ice-Age) times, i.e. in the Age of Leo (‘Loê’ in Setswana), 10800-8640 BC, when everything had to begin afresh after the thawing of the Ice Age brought about the Flood. This week, as promised, I look into the ancient but common etymologies of IE numbers and relate them to Setswana.
Naturally, we will begin with ‘one’. In Setswana it is ngwe and this is a term found across many Bantu languages. For example, even as far away as Nigeria, the leopard is i-ngwe (literally: ‘the solitary one’) and although ‘leopard’ is now nkwe in Setswana, the original sense is evidently i-ngwe. (Setswana developed a penchant for hardening certain consonants, e.g. ‘Kalanga’ is ‘Kalaka’.) Now, how can we relate ingwe to an IE term suggesting ‘one’? Whereas the Bantu pronunciation was ingwe, the IE pronunciation might have started out as ingue but ended up as inge. When we add the suffix ‘ile’, meaning ‘having become’ (e.g. as in tactile, nubile, docile, etc.) which, incidentally, is akin to the Setswana suffix ‘ile’ (‘having become’: as in senyegile, latlhegile, robegile, etc. – I will squarely address prefixes and suffixes in a future article), we get se-inge-ile – which in Setswana syntax comes out as ‘it has become one, alone’, which IE later compressed to…‘single’!
