This week’s key word is ‘comfort’, a term borrowed from the Latin con-fort(is): ‘to make [one] strong’ (Britain was under Roman conquest for centuries). The con/com difference is easily reconciled through proto-Tswana: ko n’ (Latin) and ko m’ (English) both mean ‘to [do something to] me’, as in go (ko) mpitsa (to call me) and go (ko) nkaketsa (to lie to me).
What about fort? Just as Setswana grammar tells us where to append m or n to a verb (e.g. there is no “npitsa” or “mkaketsa”), we all know that the noun of the verb feta (pass) is pheto (a passing), and the noun of fologa (descend) is phologo (descent). Out of the over 400 proto-terms now populating my ever-expanding Dictionary of Protolanguage Terms, I discovered that many Setswana words have kept the noun but not the verb. Thus, we have phorogoto (adjective/noun, meaning ‘[something of] strength’; note: the pronunciation tl instead of t came later; I have the little-known history) but we do not have forogota (verb: ‘strengthen’). ‘Fort’ and ‘forogota’, nevertheless, are demonstrable protolanguage cognates.
