The national language, Setswana is loosing its original words and taste due to the intellectuals, the pride, the innocent, the vision oriented and academics fiddling with words to suit their rightful descriptions in order to give better labels or an improved way to call those they relate with. I personally hate people who use vulgar words, whether alone or in public. I find that completely unacceptable and barbaric, if not primitive.
We are experiencing some changes in our language, words like segole, sefofu, setsenwa, lesarwa, lekula or lekalaka except lekgowa have been modified and I believe the reason behind this was to try and avoid offending other people, simply because those who use them were belittling others or had bad intensions when using those words. For this we need to congratulate those who found better and suitable words.
It is very important to explain to our children what had transpired and why there was a need to change a word like segole to banale bogole or sefofu to bathoka pono. We still have a long way to go lets now look into replacing words like LESWAFE, LEPODISI, LEKUTWANE, LEGODU, LEBURU, LEKGOWA, and others. The critical ones are Lekutwane (colored) and Leswafe (albino). We urgently need suitable words since these are local people in our society. Whoever knows better words for Leswafe, Lekutwane please share with us without delay so that offending words of this nature must end forth with.
If I may ask where did these offending words come from? Does it mean our forefathers lost the direction or the devil planted evil fields in their brains? We are struggling to prepare our minds and clean our way for Vision 2016, therefore all hindrances must be dealt with, all un- becoming behaviors be fully addressed. Batswana let us all sail in the same boat. Theatre is not only a room, church is not a building nor troop carrier. There are many things attached, let us think nationally and move away from our cocoons.
Man-Man OB. Goepamang
PALAPE
