Here, we can relate fetje to the Indo-European word vege and see that it points to the fodder that grazing animals eat, and moreover relate them to a ‘fetch’ – which alludes to ‘what a person brings to the table [from hunting or gathering]’.
Grazing animals feed by pulling vegetation into their mouths. In Setswana, this act is called phulo (a noun) and we can eas-ily relate it to the act of ‘pulling’. The verb of phulo is hula in Sotho and its English equivalent is ‘haul’. (In Setswana, hula has acquired a semantic shift in that it now means not ‘pull’ but ‘push’ (i.e. ‘shoot [out]’) – but it nevertheless remains a ‘force’ of sorts.) Let me now show that the term ‘plant’ itself – the substance on which grazing animals feed – is also premised on the term ‘pull’. The conventional etymology in dictionaries shows that it derives from the Latin word planta – which in Old Eng-lish is plante – meaning ‘a cutting’: thus a shoot or sprig cut from a larger entity and meant to be put into the ground to gener-ate offspring. Plante in Setswana terms relates to phula + nte: ‘i.e. [that which is] pulled out’. ‘Plante’, it is clear from the Setswana-based etymology, was, primordially, an active term and the noun ‘plant’ comes from this basic act of ‘pulling out’ such as to propagate [the particular organism]. So, ‘plant’ as meaning ‘to put into the ground for purposes of growing’ is a derived meaning stemming from this act of ‘pulling from’ in order to grow.
