Learning to Take

Learning languages can be difficult as one often must think outside the linguistic categories of their mother tongue. This is especially true in the area of semantics – the range of meaning that a given word possesses. For example in English, the word “green” is obviously a color, but it is also a certain part of a golf course. It’s used metaphorically to refer to something environmentally friendly and also found in an idiom which describes an envious person. So, our semantic domain for the word “green” contains some strange things that are somewhat related, yet still disconnected from each other.

When we approach a new language, it is important to shed these semantic extensions in order to not make assumptions on the semantic domains of the new language. We find ourselves doing this automatically, so much so that when there is a corollary between Amharic and English, it catches us by surprise. An example of this is the verb “wesede” (eng: he took). Now, just like the English word “took,” “wesede” refers to the action of grabbing something in one’s hand, bringing it to oneself or possibly to another location (ie. He took a cookie from the cookie jar). This is the most normal meaning. One day in class we were talking about a meeting that lasted for several hours so we said “sibsibachin sost se’at…” (Eng: meeting-our three hours…) and we paused not knowing what verb to use. To our surprise, our teacher shrugged his shoulders and finished our stalled sentence with “wesede” (Eng: he/it took). What? Meetings don’t take things, people do! Oh wait, we say the same thing in English but it never crossed our minds that this meaning of the “took” verb would carry over into Amharic.

Ok, so armed with this new understanding of the verb “wesede”(Eng: he/it took) a few days later we took a stab at another usage. Andrea was recounting her previous afternoon saying “tinish inkilf wesed-ku” (Eng: small sleep I took). Sounded good to me as I gloated in my wife’s brilliance! Our instructor, on the other hand, paused for a minute, then started to shake his head and laugh “That works in English, but in Amharic we say ‘inkilf wesede-ny’ (Eng: sleep took me).” What a concept, we don’t take a nap, instead the nap takes us! After all, in the Amharic mind, it is sleep that performs the action in taking us to another place or another state. If you think about it, they’re right. We are quite passive as sleep acts upon us. And so our understanding of ‘wesede’ is shaped by each new usage.

Every word in every language has its own unique semantic domain that must be understood in order to use it properly. At times, it’s frustrating to bend our minds into the new shape of a different language. Other times, it’s intriguing. And, at other times, its down-right funny. Our next blog will share two funny stories. First, of one sarcastic guess turning out to be correct and second, of a strange vocabulary overlap that got a whole crowd of people roaring in laughter.