Delving into the ancient etymology of �oba�

L M Leteane | Friday March 18, 2016 14:14

On the contrary, I have steadily unearthed vestiges of a fabled, now-lost universal mother language spoken of in the Tower of Babel incident of Genesis 11, whereby God deliberately scrambled the language so that nations would not understand each other and thus, collectively, be unable to ‘achieve anything they want’. Indeed, I have seen independent corroboration of that incident in mythology – except that it was not ‘God’ but ‘gods’ (an ancient oligarchy of highly advanced humans) who decided to scramble the language so that people “must not be like us, knowing everything”.

Oba gave rise to the term huba: ho (to) + oba (bend, curve, bulge). In a prior article, we examined the root-term huba and associated it with its English cognate (its equivalent) ‘hub’. We noted that dictionary etymologies are unsure of the origins of the term.

They define ‘hub’ as ‘the central part [of something]’ but then query whether it is “a variation of ‘hob’?” Looking up ‘hob’ we find that it is a ‘projection/protrusion’ of sorts, but with the query whether it is “a variation of ‘hub’?” Seeing that the two definitions point hopefully to each other for assistance, and seem to come from the same etymology, we let Setswana help out with this.  ‘Hub’, we explained, took a sense of ‘central’ from mo-hubu (navel, belly-button) which is centrally located on the body. As for the sense of ‘protruding, standing out’, this evidently derived from cases whereby the belly-button is herniated and thus protrudes. Thus, it is from this basic metaphor that both senses of the term evidently arose. Finally, we explained that the term ‘hubris’ (excessive pride) comes from the sense of wanting to ‘stand out’ amongst others. The Sotho-Tswana term ‘ho’ (to), as in ‘ho oba’(to bend), is now go in Setswana (the ‘g’ is hard as in the Spanish ‘J’ in ‘Julio), and is ‘ku/ko’ in Nguni languages. Even further north, the Swahili phrase “ha kuna matata” is “ha gona mathata” in Setswana.  From this, we can understand that the Setswana term ‘kopa’ (‘to ask for’) essentially derives from the morphemes ko + oba. Why so? When asking to be given something, one tends to ‘cup’ one’s hands, i.e. bend them in the shape of a cup. Indeed, the term ‘cup’ itself quite evidently derives from the same etymology of ‘ko-oba’ with the b hardening to a p as with ‘kopa’. In fact, ‘cuppa’ is pronounced exactly like ‘kopa’.

The proto-term ko-oba also manifests in the Setswana term koba (bend) which is also typically used when referring to ‘hard labour’.  Indeed, hard labour like working in the field tends to involve bending for long periods of time, thus the phrase ‘back breaking’. This sense of ‘hard labour’ is what led to the variant term bo-kgoba (slavery) which typically involves bending for protracted periods while working in cotton or tobacco fields. As such, one wonders whether this is where the name ‘Cuba’ comes from: it was a place where slaves worked the tobacco fields that produce the world-famous Cuban cigar.

From obe, a tense of oba, we get the term obeha (‘be able to bend, be pliant’). It does not take much to realise that it must relate to the English term ‘obey’ (be pliant to). Indeed, the sense of ‘bending, bowing and making oneself appear smaller’ is the posture one adopts in exhibiting submission. It is also possible that the term ‘bend’ itself is made up of obe + nta. The suffix nta means ‘come to’ thus ‘obenta’ evidently means ‘come to be curved’. Similarly, it is also possible that ‘belt’ was obe + leta, and leta meaning ‘allow’, thus ‘that which] allows bending’. Indeed, leta and let are obviously cognate words. All that happened was that the o was truncated, possibly to facilitate rapid speech.  But we must be careful, here, to note that ‘belt’ also has the meaning of ‘band, bond, tie together’. A belt is thus also a ‘band’, and the term  emanates from pana ‘join together’, which in turn derives from ‘a span’ (se-pana)  of oxen tied together for ploughing purposes.

As such, the term ‘belt’ carries a Middle English (ME) coalescence of bende and bande as it both ‘bends around [the waist]’ and ‘bands together’ (holds together) trouser and body. An opposite case to ‘belt/obe-leta’ whereby something is added rather than truncated is in the English term ‘orbit’ (a curved, circular path). Here, it is easy to assume that the r was simply added to obe. But in a prior article, we saw that the proto-term ‘ur/oro’ (rounded, heaped) is at the root of words like ‘curve’ (ko-uru-fa: ‘to become oro-like’). Thus, although there is a tantalising prospect of associating ‘orbit’ with obe, the etymology is different. It is perhaps unlike the case whereby the r in the Germanic term kurtz (short) is stripped away in Setswana to khutsa (shorten, make little) and thus kurtzwile relates to khutsane/khutswane. Actually the original term was not khutsa, but kuru-tsa (‘make curved’) which derives from the fact that to ‘shorten’ something, one has to bend it (or cut it), and the shortening of the term is just a part of the evolution of language.

We have thus seen that obe and uru both relate to curves and bends. Speaking specifically about obe, and remembering that golo (a place, a thing) can be kolo according to certain evolutionary sound-changes, we can now relate golo-obe (a rounded, curved, bent thing) to ‘globe’ and kolobe (kolo + obe) – a  pig – to  ‘a curved (rotund) creature’. The obe (rotundity, fatness) of a pig, we can be sure, is also embedded in the term ‘obese’. Indeed, anything that is rounded or curved, of course, appears to be ‘fat around the middle’. Now, surely in this article we once again caught a glimpse of that old, now-lost universal mother language we once all spoke.

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