To recap, I based the name ‘ten’ on the Latin term tene (‘take hold of’, which is the base-word in ‘tenet, tenant, tense, tentative, etc.’). How it relates to the number ‘ten’ is because when we want to properly grip something we normally use both of our hands and all of our digits – which digits are ten in number. I then found the root term tene to be embedded in the Setswana term tenetsa: ‘take hold of something and position it such that something else covers it’)…just as we do when we take hold of the hem of a shirt and tuck (tenetsa) it into the trousers or skirt such that it is now covered by it. Tenetsa then took a semantic shift to mean ‘cover’, but it still relates to ‘ten’ because when we attempt to cover or protect something with our hands, we spread out all our fingers over the object.
I then duly related tenetsa to the English term ‘tuck’ and further related it to the Setswana term taka. How? Taka also means ‘cover’ and when we paint over an object (i.e. ‘cover it with something’), it is mo-tako in Setswana. Taka is also the concrete mix we use to plaster (‘cover’) a wall with. A slight sound-change in both the Indo-European and Bantu language families gave us the term teka in Setswana and ‘deck’ in English. Although we may think that teka (‘cover, dress up [a table, for instance]’) is a lexical borrowing from English (i.e. to ‘bedeck’ a table is to cover or dress it up), the Setswana term has its own traceable roots to ancient proto-terms. Indeed, as in English, when one splays or spreads out all the ten fingers of both hands, one ‘decks out/teka’ all ten fingers, thus deca…which is Latin for ‘ten’! Similarly, a full ‘deck/teko’ is when all 52 cards are splayed out on the table!
