Unearthing the ancient etymology of �thuto�
L M Leteane | Friday January 8, 2016 12:29
The Setswana name for ‘education’ is thutho. As the astute reader will discern, it seems to relate to ‘tutor’ and ‘tutelage’ and many will wonder if the words are primordially related. Per my ever-expanding and upcoming Dictionary of Protolanguage Terms, there words are cognates (i.e. they spring from the same root), and in this article we will find out why.
The active tense for thuto is ‘ruta’ (teach). In my Protolanguage Dictionary, ruta it is of the same etymology as the English word ‘rote’ whose etymology English dictionaries are unclear about. It implies that learning is typically imbibed through repetition (rota). In fact, rota (‘urinate’ in Setswana) is likely to be derived from the necessary morning routine: there is something wrong if an individual does not do this in the morning.
In Setswana, most verbs beginning in r begin with t when rendered into nouns - thus ruta (verb) and thuto (noun). This primordial arrangement is now lost to Indo-European languages but vestiges of it can be seen in the words ‘taught’, ‘tutelage’ and ‘tutor’. The active English tense is ‘teach’ and dictionary etymologies say that it derives from the term ‘taican’ which said to be of the same root as ‘token’. But this, I detect, is a different etymology from ruta/rote in that the term is derived from a method of teaching; the way the act of teaching is performed. Taican evidently relates to the Setswana term tadika and taka (use the hands to leave a mark) and it can only relate to writing as a means of learning something.
A teacher is called mo-ruti in Setswana, although the term has shifted to mean ‘one who teaches the bible’: a priest. In ancient Egyptian the term was huti and the h was pronounced like the French r. The historically revered Egyptian Wisdom God Thoth was actually called ‘Tehuti’ – every Egyptologist knows – and I have deciphered this to be tee-huti (‘sole or foremost teacher’). He was called Tee-huti hare ha ma-huti (‘foremost teacher amongst teachers’) and in the apocryphal gnostic Gospel of Judas Iscariot he is simply ‘Herma-Thoth’ and later he was known only by the bridging phrase hare-a-ama and thus called ‘Hiram’ or ‘hara’a-ma’ which became ‘Harma’ or ‘Hermes’. Furthermore, in Greece the appendage ‘Trismagistus’ (‘the greatest in there disciplines’) was added to ‘Hermes’ and a branch of alchemy and philosophy called ‘Hermetic’ science was studied in earnest.
The Setswana term ruta can be replaced by laya (advise, instruct). As author Alan Alford has built a compelling case for in Gods of the New Millennium, Tehuti was indeed the Mayan god Quetzalcoatl who escaped exile in the island of Jaina in the Yucatan, Mesoamerica after a famous war with his maniacal rival Tescatilpoca Huitzilpocntli, and fled to the Himalaya mountains. I have independently confirmed that the name ‘Hima-laya’, when parsed in Setswana, means Herma-Thoth, Hermes the Teacher!
The druids of France worshipped a god called ‘Toutatis’ as anybody who has read the French comic books ‘Asterix’ will know (they were ably and even more humorously translated in English by Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge). I can now relate this mysterious god to Tehuti-Atif, ‘Atif’ being the other common appendage to ‘Tehuti’. In The Hiram Key, authors Robert Lomas and Christopher Knight, both Freemasons, reveal that a certain Masonic ritual involves a mysterious Master called Hiram Abif or Hirma Atif. He was supposed to be a Master builder who knew many secrets of architecture and died rather than reveal them to three ruffians called Jubelo, Jebela and Jeubelum. The authors relate ‘Hiram’ to a southern Egyptian pharaoh called Seqenenre Tao, but the traditions of architecture were evidently passed on to Egyptians by Tehuti who was called the ‘Divine Architect’ in Egypt. In ‘mythology’ Thoth is reputed to have built the three outstanding pyramids of Giza to commemorate the new beginning after the cataclysm of the Great Flood in the Age of the Lion (Leo: 10800 to 8640 BC: Loê in Setswana lore) but, officially, Egyptologists think they were built by a far more recent pharaoh called ‘Cheops’ in Greek although Zecharia Sitchin has revealed in detail why this view is wrong. Moreover, the Sumerian name for Tehuti was ‘Ningishzidda’ and he was called ‘Gizzida’ for short. We can easily relate ‘Giza’ to ‘Gizzida’. Masonry was used by Gizzida as a metaphor for lessons about the Grand Architect of the Universe—which is what Masonry was all about before it was penetrated by the a clan of the gods called the Enlilites and made to unwittingly serve a more secretive agenda known only to the very top echelons of the Craft.
The noun of laya is ‘lao’ which obviously relates to ‘law’. The law/lao is thus ‘what has been instructed’ and should be followed. But the rules of Setswana grammar dictate that we say tao rather than lao and this primordial grammar was evidently followed in the Himalayas and into China (whose name derives from Jaina where Thoth was detained?) where Tao means ‘learned way’, as in Bruce Lee’s ‘Tao of Jeet Kune Do’ (a martial art) and the religion of Taoism (‘the Learned Way’). The name of its founder Lao-Tzu (tsu is ‘wavy, wrinkled’ as in tsu-tsu-bana) literally means ‘instructive old man’.
Etymologically, we must be careful to distinguish thuto from touta (praise in order to sell something to another), which is ‘tout’ in English. A ‘totem’ is thus something a tribe regards in high esteem and devotes much time to praising. Teaching does often involve the process of ‘touting’ but the etymology is different. Also, the Ojibwa-derived etymology ototeman for ‘totem’ is wrongly applied: it indeed means ‘the kin of’ and in Setswana it is o o thathamang (‘he who follows after [a brother or sister]’).
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