To show off both of these features at once, I typically trace the etymology of Indo-European words and then demonstrate their commonality with Setswana terms. This week, we look at the varied and interesting forms of the proto-term loka in light of this elucidation.
Loka itself, fundamentally, is made up of morphemes lo + oka. Lo is an article that points to a noun, as in lo-obo (a shelter) and lo-bota (a wall). In Setswana, le is used more often (as in lebota) and only, typically, in cases like lo-obo where the base term begins with an ‘o’ does le-obo converge, in enunciation, to lo-obo. Oka itself means ‘attract’, thus the Setswana equivalent of ‘hook’ is ho-oka (‘that which attracts/pulls’). Of course, that which attracts will, like a magnet, typically ‘hold onto’ the thing being attracted, hence the understandable semantic shift of lo-oka to suggest ‘hold’ – and this makes the next variation of loka more understandable. We can indeed discern that the English term ‘lock’ is made up of lo + oko (‘that which binds together’). As such, when we lock a door, we bind that door to a wall or other rigid structure such that it cannot be moved. Although we can reconstruct a Setswana equivalent of ‘lock’ from proto-term morphemes, it might seem like we do not have a direct equivalent. We do – except that the ‘binding’ in this case is entailed in a sound-shift to loga (‘weave together’). Thus far, we have seen that loka always alludes to a ‘bringing together’ to make something rigid or immovable. This sense of ‘fixedness’ is evidently what led to the Sanskrit term loka (‘a place’), the root of the term ‘location’. A location, needless to say, is something that does not move; that one can expect to always find exactly where it was the last time. This is neatly captured in the Zulu term loco (‘right here’), which we can now seamlessly relate to the Latin term loco, thus ‘locale’, ‘location’, etc. So, although the term ‘locus’ suggests a path of movement, it is in fact also premised on the Latin term loco, thus suggesting ‘a fixed or restrained path’.
