Unveiling the ancient roots of �thare� and �thale�
L M Leteane | Friday April 29, 2016 14:43
Nevertheless, what does not change is that, contrary to current thinking in etymology, these terms betray vestiges of a universal mother language that allegedly once existed according to Genesis 11.
However, linguists think Indo-European has no ‘genetic’ relation with any other language family…but I will show otherwise.
I have devoted much time to successfully tracking down remnants of this now-lost protolanguage, and in this week’s article I decided to do something slightly different with my lexicography. I simply extracted words from my ever-expanding (but not yet completed or published) Dictionary of Protolanguage Terms that sound like thare or thale. (The th spelling in Setswana is to show that the t is pronounced softly, just as the English would pronounce the t in ‘tremendous’, but certainly not as they would pronounce the th in ‘thought’.) The aim: to see where similar-sounding terms would lead us, etymologically.
The pronunciation alert is important here because, for example, the ancient Egyptian name THT (Tehuti) – the name of their famous Wisdom God – came to be Anglicized as ‘Thoth’ and now relatively few people know the original pronunciation of the name.
In modern times, English would enunciate the above two terms as tahri and tahli, the ‘ah’ sounding as in the name ‘Mali’. But we also have to accommodate the fact that English now has a penchant for pronouncing the vowel ‘a’ as in ‘cat’, but this apparent deviation is not nearly enough to bury evidence that the terms are cognate with (i.e. have the same, common roots as) other language families.
We will begin with the term thari in Setswana (meaning ‘late’ or ‘behind’). We can easily relate it to the English term ‘tarry’ (be late). Now, the term ‘tarry’ in English is becoming somewhat archaic, but even if we look at the now-more-common term ‘late’ we can still relate it to the Setswana term lata (follow). Indeed, the term thari and ‘tarry’ have the definite sense of ‘following’ in that the blanket or sling for carrying a baby on the mother’s back was called a thari simply because the baby was behind the mother and was thus, in a sense, ‘following’ the mother. Ma-lata (servants) literally means ‘those that follow [a master]’ and I have discerned that malati (an alternative grammatical rendition of malata) has clear etymological links with the Hebrew term malachi (servant) and thus the English colloquial term ‘lackey’.
The second ‘proto-term’ to consider is thare (tree). Of course, the now-agreed Setswana spelling of the term is tlhare, but I have written articles where I gave, for the first time ever, the most probable history of how the shift to tlh (pronounced somewhat like cl in ‘clear’) came about.
It is quite another story but it basically entailed a ‘band of [African] followers’ documented to have accompanied the Egyptian Wisdom-God Tehuti (‘Thoth’) when he relocated to South America in 3110 BC after an altercation with his elder brother Marduk (called ‘Ra’ in Egypt). The followers were known there as ‘Olmecs’ and they evidently picked up the Nahautl penchant for tl (as in Quetzalcoatl, Tlahuizcalpantechutli, Huitzilpochtli, etc. – all being names of gods). A second point to note is that most Bantu languages – quite like Italian and Spanish which were influenced by the Moors who once invaded Europe – have a preference that every consonant be followed by a vowel. As such, many Batswana pronounce ‘six’ as ‘sikisi’ when casually talking amongst themselves. Thus, it is unsurprising that Setswana would interpose an ‘a’ between the consonants ‘tr’ – hence the pronunciation tari for ‘tree’.
A third term we will examine is ‘three’ (tharo in Setswana). Although it ends in o rather than an ‘e’ or ‘i’ and thus seems to run counter to what I had initially set out to explore, we must entertain the possibility that thari may have been the original pronunciation.
The basis for this would be that ‘one’ was the leader, ‘two’ the follower, and ‘three’ (thari) the late-comer. (We will look at the etymology of numbers in a future article and we will see there that the naming of numbers is often based on simple thing like this.) Universally, we have many variations of ‘three’ that pronounce like trei, drei, troi, trai, etc. – but certainly suggestive of a common source for the term. In fact, the English th in ‘three’ (pronounced as in ‘thought’) is again the exception rather than the rule.
The last set of terms we will look at are those along the line of thale: i.e. that employ an l instead of r. Incidentally, a thale in Setswana is a thread or tangible line, and a line is something that extends far more in one direction than the other, i.e. is elongated.
This, it is clear, is the sense entailed in ‘tall’ (an evident variation of thale). In botany (and borrowed from Latin), a ‘thallus’ is a plant ‘undifferentiated into true roots, stem and leaves’ i.e. shaped like one continuous thread or filament.
In another sense, when one is able to keep a ‘thread’ or ‘line’ of thought, one is ‘bo-thale’ (clever) in Setswana, and this relates semantically to ‘tally’ (count, calculate) – an act that requires reasoning.
Mo-thale (‘way’ or ‘line’ of [doing something]) definitely relates to ‘model’: a device that demonstrates how something is done. Although dictionaries relate the etymology of ‘model’ to ‘ideal’ (i.e. ‘mo-ideal’) I still relate ‘ideal’ to i-thale (a way, a line, an approach – the ‘i’ being an Nguni-type definite article that precedes a noun)! Finally, let us consider the etymology of ‘thread’ itself. Can we relate it directly to ‘thale’? The suffix ‘-ed’ (as in ‘emaciated, contrived’, etc.) means ‘having become’, and thus ‘thread’ is simply ‘thale-ed’ with the now-familiar l to r sound-change!
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