Anyone who’s learned a foreign language knows that there are phases you go through. There’s that “I only know one verb in the past tense” phase, where every time your teacher asks you on Monday what you did this weekend, you say, “I slept.” There’s the “I understand your question but cannot form an answer” phase. And then there’s the “repeat this utterly useless sentence to master a grammar or pronunciation point” phase, which is mind-numbingly frustrating.
That’s the phase I’m in at the moment. For linguistic reasons about which you do not care at all, trust me, the most important — and indeed, quite nearly the most sophisticated — thing I can say, over and over, in Kinyarwanda is, “Your pig is long.”
There’s a verb in Swahili which means, “to walk in on your parents having sex”. It’s one word.
This is real. When a fellow white person said the word to me the first thing I did was look it up in a dictionary. The dictionary was close-minded, so I pronounced the word to a Tanzanian non-English speaker and asked her what it meant. She mimed it for me: stroll down the hall, innocently open the door, and–with an exaggerated, wide-eyed gasp–cover your face and flee.
I spent a week conjugating it into causative, subjunctive, passive, imperative, conditional, past, present, future, first-person, second-person, any number of people, and Swahili’s unique “narrative” (-ka-) tense.
If I have one regret in life, it’s that I didn’t write that word down somewhere. If words were paintings, I’d frame it.
Oh my god, I can’t believe you could learn such a thing and let it go. This is indeed a great tragedy, for you and for us.
On the other hand, that’s the beauty of Bantu languages — one word, worlds of meaning (in teeny tiny two-letter grammatical packets!).