Of course, the concept of a now-lost universal language is covered in Genesis 11’s account of the Tower of Babel, but what is still unknown is that Setswana is still very close to that old protolanguage, and this is what I cover in this column.
The proto-term roggo actually started off not relating at all to vegetables. The term, it strongly appears, originally meant ‘red’. In various prior articles, I traced the root of the term ‘red’ as being ru-ed, i.e. as literally meaning ‘having become ru [in colour]’. Grammatically speaking, this is exactly as in the term ‘roggo’: whose morphemes are ru + oga, the suffix oga (as opposed to ologa) meaning ‘become’ (ologa, we saw last week, means ‘undo, un-become’. As such, even the Setswana term ru-ru-oga means ‘become ru [in colour]’ – a term perhaps secondarily or semantically applied to a ‘swelling’ – now its present meaning – simply because, we can detect, a swelling in the body typically becomes blood-engorged and thus appears ruddier than the rest of skin. Even the term ‘ruddy’ itself – and others like ‘rustic, ruby, etc.’ – all relate to ‘red’. From this, we can more easily understand why ‘desert’ (desh’ret) means ‘red-land’: the soil of deserts – even sand dunes – tend toward red in colour. But since desha (land) has a very interesting etymology, let us devote a few lines to examining the proto-term.
