At the peak of letters that pique my interest
are those that are silent. Have you ever taken
a peek at the sea of silent letters one can see
but cannot hear? Have you ever studied the A-Z list?
In Ndebele, people say one should love the peanut plant,
plus all its seeds. You cannot claim to love the groundnut
plant without the nut! Similarly, one cannot praise the meat
in the plate and doom the beef soup or broth in the same bowl.
The Ndebele, Zulu and Xhosa word for potage is umsobho.
When a person says something mind-numbing or offensive,
you can metaphorically reference it as the congealing,
thickening, or solidifying of fat in soup. Ukunquma.
I liken the silencing of letters to a strange solidified stew
that the elders in their wisdom would probably tell one
that it doesn’t work like that. They would put it like this:
“Man, if you’re going to love and traditionally marry
a loving lady, then love her totally with all her children.
You cannot winnow her from her offspring. No. Forget.
Those adopted innocent kids from a previous relationship
are your children. Don’t talk of stepchildren. Step what?
Don’t dare step on the balls of their ancestors by doing
something as silly as telling them you’re not biologically
related to them and their lineage. Man, you abuse them
at your risk. To their mom, they come before you. Know that.”
If the English language were an eater, it would be a great gourmet,
a collector that consumed or borrowed from other languages like Greek
and Latin, that have different sound patterns, and yet it decided to be fussy,
“No, those sound combinations are too odd for us to accept. We will resist
pronouncing them, except that these two words are now ours, our heritage.
We’ve Anglicised them. We’re richer. They sound alike, call them homonyms”.
What a nerve. Can someone please indict them and give them a receipt. A debt
of thanks and apologies is what they owe for pronouncing the words differently
than in their languages of origin. For instance, they muted the m in mnemonic
like a bossy host on Zoom and forgot that this word is about “assisting memory”.
Doesn’t Memory tell me that mnemonic drifted to English from Greek via Latin?
