Words are powerful. They hold the ability to sway minds, to build and topple governments and to become a seed of suspicion. They also hold the ability to right wrongs and take away scary dreams in the night. Words give us the ability to share our lives with others by shaping images, describing our feelings and sometimes even creating realities we wish into existence.
I am endlessly fascinated by the way words change in different languages and the way we use them to describe our surroundings. Anyone taking up a second tongue can recognize the poetic quality of learning the origin of foreign phrases. I just recently read an account in Night Studies..... by Benjamin Madison in which he learns the Oron language and becomes captivated by word for fireflies. Which is also the word for stars...when coupled with the word for moon. He takes it to mean the stars are the moons fireflies, poetic enough, until you stop to wonder which word came first. Maybe the fireflies are the stars of the earth. Either way, it's enough to give you pause and make you wonder why English has to have words for both.
And while my Lingala lessons have somehow become discontinued (all for the sake of the revolution I suppose) I am still left with memories of the battle that ensued over the word for green. My Lingala teacher has been quite excellent at giving me the many variations on spoken Lingala, Kinshasa Lingala, written Lingala and 'country' Lingala. There is, of course, variations on all of those variations depending on which generation you're in. He tries to fit those in as well. As you might have guessed, my lessons are slow going. I write things down in order to "see" them better in my mind, but then the spoken version is usually some kind of contraction and so seeing the word in my head isn't really much help. Immersion seems like the only solution.
But I still find pleasure in hearing those poetic turns of phrase and the explanations that he provides. We were working on colors. As always, there was a mix of French and even some forgetting altogether. Then we stumbled across the word for green. Mayi ya pondu. Water from leaves. The artist in me can see exactly how this might come about. Making dyes and cooking. What better way to describe green than the way it could actually be made. I could just imagine how a fabric soaked in pondu could produce a comforting, leafy green color. Or perhaps it came from the green stained fingers of women working hard to wash and rinse and prepare this staple food for their families.
But of course, I like to check things out. So I began to ask around. And that's when the firestorm started. Mayi ya fireworks. One of my close friends insisted that surely there was a word for green. Green, the most popular and predominant color found in nature, surely had to have it's own name. There was pembe for white and motane for red and moyindo for black (blue has long been forgotten.) While he couldn't actually supply the word for green, he was certain it existed. I continued to ask around.
I heard a funny story about women in the marketplace who'd come to calling everything 'mayi ya...' as in 'give me that skirt, no the mayi ya bleu one.' I liked this story because it gave credence to the whole color of leaves theory and added some patriotic pride as the women, apparently also forgetting the word for blue, wanted to add in something of Lingala to make their shopping authentic. But that wasn't really enough to convince my friend. At the next family gathering, somehow the subject came up. No one could provide an alternative but it still didn't convince my friend. In fact, he was even more convinced that they were all just siding with me in deference to the funny foreigner and would agree to pretty much anything I suggested.
Like so many of my Lingala lessons, I am torn between fascination at the merging of languages and sadness at the loss of words. But I am always left wishing English were a bit more poetic. Although, I must guess that words used over and over again lose their potency. Or do they? Can you really insult your mother-in-law when you are constantly calling her "ma belle mere?" Maybe if we kept repeating these phrases of beauty they would turn into phrases of truth. Maybe we could all benefit from spending more time noticing the color of water running through leaves.
