The Sunday News
COMMUNITIES all over the world name various objects that they encounter around them and sometimes beyond their immediate environs. The various names that they give reflect the language of those communities and express what they consider, as the main traits of the numerous objects including the named ones, be they samples of flora and fauna, including inanimate objects.
Names serve as identifiers and, for animals that respond to calls, they answer either verbally or through action-related responses. In the case of human beings, they will have identity documents that identify them and sometimes these are accompanied by their facial images. We have in the past dealt more exhaustively with the processes and intricacies of names and naming.
Communities usually name their neighbouring communities because of various reasons ranging from their inter-community relationships, be they good or acrimonious. Essentially, naming is not a hit-and-miss affair. Rather, it stems from underpinning or informing conditions, wishes and commentaries on the goings on at the time of a baby’s birth. Physical characteristics of babies at birth may be the stimuli for chosen names.
Names become indicators of a community’s comprehensive knowledge of its environment; the vents taking place in its environment, including the terrestrial one where stars have been named based on their perceived individual qualities, both physical and behavioural. As was pointed out in the last article, named objects have generic or classificatory names such as stars, trees, grasses, mountains and human beings.
mountains image taken from Shutterstock
Primary or classificatory names are broader and more embracing as they capture common or generic features or qualities. Secondary or individual names point to the unique and individualistic traits associated with particular objects within a broader class. An example of this desire to name all objects is when an unknown or nameless tree was named, “tree without a name,” muti usina zita. That became the name of what hitherto had been an unnamed tree.
A normal community will give names to their children and everything else in line with their spoken language. Inventions done by members of a community are given names in that community’s language, a practice that gives a community some sense of pride and glory. A given community acquires the much-needed currency and relevance in a competitive world where visibility is sought. Not so long ago I saw an advertisement extolling the virtues and efficacy of a medicinal formulation. The much-vaunted medicine was called Kosorex. I suspected it was a hybridised name combining English and ChiShona. Kosora is a ChiShona word for coughing.
More recently, I heard about a name that sounded Ndebele. The exalted name was Sinamuva Chemicals. I was exceedingly happy that African pharmacists and chemical engineers were beginning to recognise their languages and giving them some long overdue respect and reverence. After all, who says science is unintelligible in African languages?
African pharmacists image taken from istock
Extending dominion over objects around us demands that we name those objects. It is as if the language of a community is becoming a vehicle through which the community exerts control over the environment, including the various peoples found therein. An unnamed world is an unknown world.
Languages identify communities’ developmental histories. A development links a given community with related communities. Where languages are similar, we can surmise that the languages developed from a common root and the people are of a common origin.
Where two languages exhibit close similarities, this may be a pointer to the fact that the two have a recent shared historical origin prior to their fission and separate development. Where a particular plant is called fazhamuka in ChiNyubi, and the same plant is called umafavuke in IsiNdebele, we may surmise that the two languages shared a recent common past. Indeed, the two are what Dr Bleek called the Bantu languages found in southern Africa.
Fa, in IsiNdebele means to die. Vuka means to spring to life once again following death. The two words fa and vuka give the IsiNdebele word umafavuke. Fa in ChiNyubi equally refers to death. Muka means to rise again, rising from a condition of death.
Indeed, the plant that is so named has the trait of looking as if it is dead in the absence of moisture. Should there be some light rain shower, it assumes a green colour and sheds the brown hue associated with a state of dryness and symbolic or death. It is no wonder the plant is called a resurrection herb in English. This commonality beyond immediate separate ethnic identities is one that embraces different racial groups.
The point in embracing this somewhat convoluted introduction was to provide some background to names of stars and use these to figure out the more closely related languages and their speakers. However, it is important to realise that where there are shared similarities in names there are shared worldviews, thought, beliefs, cosmologies and beliefs. The names of stars are thus born of a shared view of the world, itself a testimony to shared histories, legends, mythologies that gave rise to the names.
We now turn to the names of stars to unpack shared ideas and commonalities that inform the names and bear witness to related lingual characteristics. The one-shared trait of stars relates to their brightness, ukunkanyazela. In Xhosa, the generic name for stars is inkwenkwezi. In IsiZulu and IsiNdebele, it is called inkanyezi. The two names do seem to be related though I may not possess the technical language skills to analyse the two words.
Stars
In ChiShona the name is nyenyedzi. The ChiVhenda version is maledzi. Maledzi and nyenyedzi seem closer to each other than each one of them to either inkwenkwezi or inkanyezi. We may surmise that TshiVhenda and ChiShona are closer to each other than they are to either IsiXhosa or IsiZulu. Both the latter are classified as Nguni languages and that alone tells us they are closer to each other. IsiNdebele, being a Nguni language, uses a name for a star that is closer to the IsiZulu name, inkanyezi.
The Sotho word for star is dina ledi. The Tsonga version is tinya ledi. In Setswana, it is lina deri. Again, we encounter closer proximity among the three languages. History does confirm that. Through scrutiny of languages, we are able to figure out underlying common histories and relatedness among the various languages.
What we glean from this narrative is that naming and names serve as pointers to ideas held by a given community and the choices it makes in giving names to stars and indeed other objects both near and far. Through names, we are able to detect relatedness and thus separate development of languages.
Perhaps most importantly, we are able to excavate the underpinning commonalities that, in essence, embrace common ideas, beliefs, cosmologies, thought and sometimes philosophies. This is what we are going to find when it comes to names for constellations, galaxies and individual stars.
When we delve into African cultural astronomy or African ethnoastronomy, we shall find similar ideas in terms of the roles stars play in the lives of African peoples, ranging from their (stars) roles as observatories, in navigation, telling time, determining when rituals and ceremonies are to be performed and documenting times of birth of individuals and portending impending calamities.
Beyond the generic name for stars, we shall seek some Afro-centric understanding of stars, the bases for their names and how they have come to influence African beliefs, African astral views, the relationship between spirituality and stars.
