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*THE DEPTH OF LANGUAGE*
One of the ways in which to gauge the level of people’s consciousness and the intelligence developed, is by going after the words they use in their indigenous languages to find if the speaker speaks with the essential concepts behind and carries in themselves the spirit in which those words were conceived, their etymology and axiology capturing the original intent with the meaning given to it. If words are gateways to concepts it would mean we should be able to break them down to their root and dissect them for meaning.
Why am I saying all this?
Words spoken devoid of the above learning and understanding necessities, spoken outside of their conceptual frameworks which culture informs and is the coordinates provider for, the languages we speak are the kernel emptied of its husk. They will lack the corresponding imagery that culture fashions out in its configuration of nature. Words become empty and dead place holders that any foreign spirit, spirit foreign to the culture that created those words, and they become what any hegemonic culture want them to mean.
For example, my Basotho people today, have the word ‘Lekunutu’ used to simply mean ‘a secret’. When you dig deeper into the broader Afrikan linguistic genome, you see cognations tying many words from different Afrikan cultures together, and not by syntax alone, but meaning and what it is encapsulates it histro-functionally. There’s a Kemetic (ancient Egyptian) word ‘khanu/khanutt’ which according to Budge’s Egyptian Heiroglyphics Dictionary means ‘a private space’, ‘the most sacred space in a temple’. Kindly observe; the Sesotho word ‘lekunutu’, linked to the Kemetic word ‘khanu/khanutt’ by inferred cognation, and the etymology I am suggesting, breaking it down, would be ‘le-khanu’ or ‘le-khanutt’ (‘le’ in the word ‘lekunutu’ is a prefix to denote a thing and ‘kunutu’ is the root word. I find my etymological axiological connection of ‘kunutu’ with ‘khanu/khanutt’ helpful in accessing the concept behind the word and capturing its spirit.
Another word, for purpose of this text, is ”nete’ or ‘nnete’ which is what my Basotho people use supposedly in equivalence to what is called “truth”. I previously defined the word ‘nnete’ as ‘square’, breaking it down into ‘nne’, which is the number 4 and ‘te’ a word from the Bapedi Sotho group which means ‘only’/’one’ with the denotation of the emphasis on exclusivity. ‘Square-dealing’ would better express the meaning the dissecting unearths. ‘Square’ can also be defined as “straight, honest, honorable, not disposed to cheat or defraud; not deceptive or fraudulent, lawful, conformable to or allowed by law,
aboveboard, straightforward
without concealment or deception; honest, guileless, transparent,
free of deceit”.
For our word ‘nnete’ the Kemetic word is ‘ntt’. And what does ‘ntt’ mean? – ‘That which is’, ‘what is’, ‘everything that is’, ‘this which is’. Clearly, when we say ‘nnete’, we speak in absolute terms giving no latitude to the relativist and post-modernist clutter by European spin doctors and intellectual thugs, that “Your truth is not my truth”, which is the seed-bed for lies to proliferate undetected and unopposed”.
(ThT. Itumeleng Makale is an Independent Afrikan Sovereignist Scholar)
24 December 2021
