Full Speed Ahead

We hit the ground running by having our official Gmz language lessons start just 4 days after arriving in our new house. Now, two weeks later we have established our routine of meeting with our three teachers six days a week (each one comes two days) and our latest vocabulary count is up over 500 words. Now some of those words are not highly significant, such as “earlobe” and “snot rocket,” but you never know when those words might be needed – “Hey, your snot rocket just landed on my earlobe!” See what I mean?

 

Anyway, it’s been fun to be diving into these new words and starting to see some things. For example, after discovering what the negation suffix is (“-ango”), we look back through our vocab and see how many of our collection of opposites are actually just negations – for example, “deshi” means “heavy,” and so while “ashiango” may be a common word for “light,” it literally means “not heavy.” Andrea was the first to observe that two different words for the same thing often find their meaning in word combinations. For example, “borigiya” is the standard word for “flower,” but one of our teachers insisted on “borma” being the correct word. Why? Well, “borma” is the right word for any flower, but most flowers are “burigiya” because they stand alone (not on trees or bushes) and “burigiya” is the combination of “borma” (flower) and “giya” (tree/wood/stick).

 

The vocabulary itself reveals things about the culture. The Gmz have a lot of experience with maintaining beehives and collecting the honey. Therefore, it shouldn’t surprise me that there are four different words for honey based on the different types found inside the beehive. Let’s see, there’s the normal liquid honey (saangwa), then the white honey which is made by the baby bees (cididema); and then the thick stuff that is good for an upset stomach (kwant’ema), and one more that I haven’t understood yet (mecena). It’s also fun to see where semantic overlap occurs differently than English. For example, when we learned the word for “to spill,” it immediately rang a bell as the same word for “to rain.” Therefore, either the upset cup “rains” onto the table or the rain “spills” off the clouds and onto the earth. Then, Andrea keenly asked and discovered that the same word is used for crying as tears “spill” out onto one’s cheeks. Makes sense.

 

It’s one thing to write down what the Gmz are saying, but it’s another to actually spit it back at them. I say this because of the non-English sounds that Gmz employs. No there are no clicks for which African languages are famous (thanks to the movie “The God’s Must Be Crazy”), but it does have explosive and implosive consonants (neither of which are in English). Implosives are especially fun and Gmz has at least two (b and d). Try saying a word like “bike” or “riding” and instead of the “b” and the “d” being created with air being pushed out of your lungs, make it so that the air gets sucked in (thus implosive). If you can’t figure it out, ask us for a demonstration next time we are in the neighborhood (or on skype).

 

Anyway, we are having fun learning and although we still have a long way to go, it’s nice that we are growing in our ability to spit out (or suck in) a few Gmz words every now and then.