The etymology of dimensions: para, peri and circa
L M Leteane | Friday January 15, 2016 16:28
As regards Europe, for a long time the ‘classic’ study of Greek was compulsory at universities, and Greek philosophers, mathematicians and astronomers are revered to this day throughout the world. But all indications are that the Greek civilisation admired, learnt from and copied much of its learning and ways from the more ancient civilisation of Egypt in North Africa. In this article we are going to go further than this and relate the Greek prefixes para, peri and circa with Setswana with the intention of demonstrating that they originate from a common but long-lost mother language that I am steadily uncovering.
One factor these terms have in common is that they are all fundamental to a measurement and physical dimensions. Greece was an empire that expanded and then disintegrated in the lifetime of Alexander the Great of Macedonia (a region of today’s Greece). Centuries later, it was defeated and followed by an ardent admirer and emulator of all its best attributes: Rome. And it was Rome that penetrated most of Europe and brought ‘civilisation’ to Europe’s ‘barbarians’. (Greece only overran and consolidated its surrounds, conquered Egypt, and headed eastward to Babylon, where Egypt’s famous Oracle of Delphi had assured Alexander that he can meet his true father the god Amun (Baal or Belus).
Alexander’s adventures feature very much in our consideration of the term para. The Greek prefix para relates to both phara and para in Setswana. Phara means ‘breadth’ and it is the root of the term ‘parallel’ which can be understood in Setswana as consisting of para + lala (to lay), thus ‘lying a distance [away]’. Parallel lines indeed run a distance away from each other and never meet. Other common words that utilise para as phara (broad) are paradigm, parachute, paragon and many others.
Rather less understood are the ancient terms ‘pharaoh’ and ‘paradise’. Pharaoh (which means ‘Great House’) consists of phara + aho (‘building’, now kaho in Sotho-Tswana) and paradise was phara + disa (‘guard’), thus ‘[a place that] is guarded the length and breadth of it’. Good examples of the latter’s proper and original meaning can be gleaned from the fact that Eden was guarded by an angel with ‘a flaming sword that turned in every direction’.
In Zecharia Sitchin’s book The Stairway to Heaven there is an ancient illustration of two god-like creatures with wings wielding what looked like a searchlight. Its beam was not doubt like a ‘flaming sword’ when coupled with a laser beam that shot out when an intruder into Eden was spotted. It was called the ‘dreaded spotlight that sweeps the mountains’. On approaching this high-security area, both Gilgamesh and Alexander of Macedonia – historically attested kings – were confronted by ‘bird-men’ and they succeeded in turning Alexander away.
Of course E-di-En (‘Place of the Gods) was where the all-important shems (space-rockets) were kept by the ‘gods’. In Setswana, we rightly call a ‘pair’ para but tend to think that we borrowed this word, yet we have ma-para (thighs) which are usually a pair! Now, there is another sense of para that will lead us to our consideration of the Greek term peri.
According to the Setswana rules of grammar and syntax, the active tense—the verb—of para is fara (accommodate by placing on the laps (mapara); thighs become laps when one is in a sitting position). But when the accommodation is mobile, it leads to the sound change ‘ferry’ as we will now see. The etymology of peri, we can detect, is based primarily on felle which in languages like ancient Egyptian and Shona becomes r (they see l as baby-like), thus ferre. Indeed, fele-hetsa in Sotho-Tswana is to accompany someone up to their home – to the completion of their journey [and then return]).
The verb ‘ferry’, then, has a sense of ‘take all the way [round]’ hence its noun is peri (all the way round) as in ‘perimeter’, ‘peripatetic’ (visiting around the world) and periphery (around the outside). This gave rise to a variant verb phereta which has the sense of ‘restlessness’. The verb of this became hereta – the source of the noun ‘heretic’ – which is someone who agitates others (makes them restless). This sense of ‘going this way and that’ was encapsulated in the Dutch term perd – their name for ‘horse’: an animal that takes one ‘here and there’. There is also a ‘bird’ that was displayed in the Cairo Museum that looked suspiciously like an aircraft. Etched on it were the words ‘Per Damien’ which scholars translate as ‘Gift of Amen’.
I disagree. Peret-a-me-en means ‘horse of the gods’ which is how people viewed fixed-wing aircraft. (I have explained in prior articles that scholars commonly mistake the prayer-ending a-me-en (amen) as meaning ‘may it be so’ whereas ‘[mafoko] a me-en’ is an affirmation that ‘these are ‘words and supplications meant specifically for the gods’.) If peri has the general sense of ‘going around’, the term circa specifically means ‘round’ or ‘around’. ‘Circa’ is the source of the term ‘circle’. In Setswana, ‘circa’ is se-raka. Why does raka mean round? In Hebrew the term rakia is associated with a bracelet or large ring.
In Setswana, le-rako is an enclosure and it is typically round so as to encapsulate and contain something. Its basic meaning comes from the fact that a circle is not really complete until the two curved lines meet. The term ‘meet’ is thus important. Derivative terms include rakana (meet each other) and raka (preempt someone by meeting them when they least expect it). Moraka is therefore where livestock meets after grazing in the open and Maracana stadium (Brazilian blacks came from Africa and carried its language there) means ‘place of gathering’. In this article, we surely caught a glimpse of the universal mother-language that once bound us as one.
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