Exploring the ancient etymologies of numbers
L M Leteane | Friday May 6, 2016 12:22
On the contrary, and just as Genesis 11 avers, I have unearthed remnants of a global protolanguage we all spoke as recently as the Neolithic (post–Ice-Age) times, i.e. in the Age of Leo (‘Loê’ in Setswana), 10800-8640 BC, when everything had to begin afresh after the thawing of the Ice Age brought about the Flood. This week, as promised, I look into the ancient but common etymologies of IE numbers and relate them to Setswana.
Naturally, we will begin with ‘one’. In Setswana it is ngwe and this is a term found across many Bantu languages. For example, even as far away as Nigeria, the leopard is i-ngwe (literally: ‘the solitary one’) and although ‘leopard’ is now nkwe in Setswana, the original sense is evidently i-ngwe. (Setswana developed a penchant for hardening certain consonants, e.g. ‘Kalanga’ is ‘Kalaka’.) Now, how can we relate ingwe to an IE term suggesting ‘one’? Whereas the Bantu pronunciation was ingwe, the IE pronunciation might have started out as ingue but ended up as inge. When we add the suffix ‘ile’, meaning ‘having become’ (e.g. as in tactile, nubile, docile, etc.) which, incidentally, is akin to the Setswana suffix ‘ile’ (‘having become’: as in senyegile, latlhegile, robegile, etc. – I will squarely address prefixes and suffixes in a future article), we get se-inge-ile – which in Setswana syntax comes out as ‘it has become one, alone’, which IE later compressed to…‘single’!
However, Setswana’s direct commonality with the Indo-European term ‘one’ is through the term mongwe (i.e. mo-ingwe in ‘proto-terms’: note here that the ‘i’, when subjected to rapid speech, will tend to become muted and eventually disappear – as indeed happened). I surmise that the creeping sound-change to mongwe (thus mun (mo-un) in Sumerian texts) overshadowed ingwe, which eventually became ‘uno’ in the peculiar way that language develops, hence the English term ‘one’. And here, for a change, European languages can actually help sort out Setswana etymology. In Sotho-Tswana dialects, there is both nosi and monosi – and both mean ‘one, alone’. However, the term ‘nosi’ appears to be a truncation of monosi even though in modern Setswana the former is deemed to be the grammatically correct term. I say this because we have the term ‘mono(s)’ (mo-uno) in Latin. So, what was ‘monosi’? The proto-term zi/si, I explained in detail in past articles, means ‘here’ and I will not go into the etymology here in the interest of space. As such, mono-zi simply means ‘alone here (or, at this moment)’ and the term ‘nosi’ was simply extracted from this.
In Setswana, ‘two’ is bedi. We can easily relate it to the Greek term ‘beta’. But why the difference in ending (Setswana with an i and Greek with an a)? Actually, ‘beta’ was the correct, original meaning and it was based on the proto-term pheta (‘repeat’: the ph in pheta is pronounced as a soft p – like in ‘Peter’). The term pheti differs only in that it is a grammatical rendition suggesting ‘a completed action’, and so pedi/bedi is merely another tense of pheta. What about the English term ‘two’: does it relate to Setswana? It originates from the Latin term ‘duo’. In Setswana, the term duo (as in ma-duo) means ‘result’. Evidently, the underlying semantics suggest that ‘two’ is a result of ‘one’ having propagated itself. The metaphor, we can discern, was a single seed. When planted, it yields (brings ma-duo of) more seed.
Tharo, Setswana for ‘three’, is the least changed proto-term. Actually, its old English (OE) pronunciation is threo…and if you pronounce it quickly, but with the th enunciated as a soft t like in ‘table’, you will find that it has hardly changed at all. In French it is now ‘trois’ and in the original pronunciation it sounded more like ‘Troy’, as in the famous city of Homer’s tales. In fact, ‘Troy’ does mean ‘three’: it was in a region that was at the boundary of the ‘third part of the world’, i.e. where the blond, fair-haired people separated from the ‘black-headed ones’ of Asia and the Middle East. (Now, ‘black-headed’ meant ‘black-haired’, just as Setswana’s lethogo-tshweu means ‘white-haired’…and exactly the same way the German term ‘schwartzkopf’ means ‘black-haired’ even though it is literally ‘black-headed’.) Troy was located in what is now Turkey – and ‘Turkey’ is actually Troi-ki, or ‘Third [part of the] World’: ki is a Sumerian term meaning ‘Earth’. The etymology of ‘four’ – nne in Setswana – is by far the trickiest to unravel. Nne (the perfect tense of nna: ‘sit, be steady’ is derived from nature: ‘four legs are the steadiest’. Indeed, for a three-legged stool to bear weight steadily, the three legs must be carefully positioned in an equilateral shape, and a dog has to shift its weight skillfully to compensate for an incapacitated leg. As for the English term ‘four’, the name is derived from how we indicate the number using our fingers: i.e. typically by bending or ‘hiding’ the thumb. In Setswana, the phrase “can be hidden” is simply ‘fithega’, and since the suffix ‘ega’ is enunciated almost like ‘oga’ (oha in Sotho) – a suffix meaning ‘undoing’ – the [o]wor in fidwor (Gothic for ‘four’) and the uor in quattuor (Latin for ‘four’) suggest fithega and gatega rather than fithoga and gatoga. Similarly, feower (Old English) and fior (Old High German) suggest fihega (darken, become less visible) rather than fihoga.
Tlhano (‘five’ in Setswana) literally means ‘change suddenly’, or ‘reveal another side’ (tlhanoga). What is ‘revealed’, here, is the once-hidden thumb. In Latin/French, quinque/cinq is literally ‘can I now take?’ (ke-nke?) in Setswana – and we find the same sense in fünf (German: fana-fii), and fif /vijf (Old English, Dutch: fii-fa: ‘give out [freely]’, which is what an unfolded hand can now do. More numbers (5-10) next week.
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