BY MULUGETA GUDETA
It goes without saying that like any human invention, language is dynamic rather than static. It changes with history, human activities both in peaceful and turbulent times. The dynamic nature of language is perhaps best illustrated in the following passage. “It is true that language is dynamic. It travels from one place to the other and its changes. Different people speak different languages in different countries.
However some words in every language are very similar to other words. This happens because of the dynamism of language.” We should perhaps add by saying that the dynamic nature of language is more pronounced during times of upheavals than in normal times.
February 1974 was a turning point in Ethiopian history and the most famous word that emerged at that time was “revolution” that was translated in Amharic as “abyot”. According to one language professor of the time “abyot” means “to say no” or “to refuse”. In English the term “revolution” has two meanings. The first is political while the second is about mechanics. The first is a “forcible overthrow of a government or social order, in favor of a new system” The second meaning of the word is “an instance of revolving”.
When we come to the Amharic translation, we realize that it has only one meaning and that is political. All languages are supposed to be equal in the sense that they meet the communication needs of specific peoples at specific times. Yet, we should not overlook the fact that some languages are more developed than others due to historical, economic and social circumstances. English is thus richer than say, Amharic in the sense that it is more expressive, rich in its vocabulary and complex in its syntax. Thus, “abyot” has one meaning in Amharic but “revolution” has many meanings in politics, mechanics and astronomy.
This is not however the main point of our discussion in this article. Our focus is on the fact that new words that are often coined or translated from foreign languages during historic times tend to misrepresent their true meanings or sometimes distort their essence. In our example above “revolution” in politics is about replacing one system by another but in Amharic it is narrowly translated as “the act of refusal or the act of saying no”
We can take another example of a word that has been translated from English that has lost its true contextual meaning and created so much chaos and misled politicians on the Left who had based their actions on it, resulting into confusion and wrong course of actions. The word “nation” has a different connotation in Marxist theory mainly espoused by Joseph Stalin while the same term has a different meaning when used by nationalist intellectuals of different colors and pretensions.
The promoters of the infamous “national question” had missed something when they embraced it uncritically in the first place. This is also the reason why the concept or theory has become the single most devastating misunderstanding that has continued to upset the post-revolution political system in Ethiopia to this day. For that matter, it did not last long even in its native land Russia. Stalin’s “national question” finally led to the catastrophic national disintegration.
If memory does not fail us, the biggest linguistic upheaval occurred in this country some fifty years ago when the revolution brought with it not only radical changes in land tenure but also in the vocabulary and use of the Amharic language in particular. A whole set of new words made their entry into the language for the first time. New words were invented not only to express the new realities, but also to facilitate (or often hinder) conversations among the educated elite. Old ones were given new meanings and translated words invaded the political realm to promote understanding (but often misunderstanding) among the political elites.
Even ordinary citizens were not spared from this “semantic turmoil”. Words were sometimes taken out of context or given twisted meanings to express the opposite of what they really meant. There was a joke going around town at that particular time when the common folk used the new words as they fit into their mentalities and urgencies so much so that they understood the word, “socialism” as meaning the need for everyone to share whatever they may have (money or belongings) with their fellow citizens.
Guided as he was by the misguided or distorted meaning of this particular word, a man dipped his hand into the pocket of another fellow, shouting on top of his voice: “Let’s share what you have in this pocket of yours because this is the time of socialism!” To this uninformed and innocent fellow, socialism meant a system whereby everyone shares what they have with everyone else. This incident was welcomed with laughter but there were many moments when misunderstood words and their distorted meanings led many people to act in ways that did not warrant the use of those same words.
Many words about socialism were so confusing and difficult to understand that the government of the time gathered together linguists from academic institutions and told them to prepare “a dictionary of progressive words” starting of course from the word “revolution” itself. This was the hottest single topic and a fiercely debated word, meaning different things to different people that later one carried many risks and led many intellectual into the quagmire of mutual disagreement that later on deteriorated into violence with weapons of mutual exterminations during the tragic episode known as “ Red Terror”.
Words could indeed kill or save, as one anonymous local wise man is often quoted as saying. When one group of radicals came up with the concept of “white terror” the other group responded in kind by describing its acts as ‘red terror”. At the end of the day both sides ended up in bloodbath from which they have not healed themselves even after half a century. The saddest fact was that neither red nor white terror were Ethiopian concepts or were not coined by the people but by the so-called “well-read generation”. In between innocent youngsters lost their lives while the groups were fighting for supremacy. When elephants fight, it is indeed the grass that suffers.
Socialism is not an Ethiopian idea. It was imported from abroad, mainly from Russia, by educated intellectuals who did not themselves understand what it really meant although they had the advantage of foresight because they were educated in schools and universities while the farmers were illiterate. Who misled whom may be debatable but the educated folks should be the first to communicate the real meaning of the term. Unfortunately they started to learn the ABC of socialism while the revolution was in progress.
It was a kind of “learning on the job” and mistakes were inevitably made because this kind of knowledge required time, and a critical mentality to mature and yield positive results if any at all. What the so-called revolutionaries of the generation of the 1960s and 1970s were doing was to pick up their guns to punish all those who opposed their borrowed ideas even before they themselves properly assimilated the new vocabularies or concepts. And that was a national disaster of course.
In one of his classic works, French author and dramatist Moliere exposed the comic effect of language in one of his dramas where the leading character asks what “prose” means while he was speaking and writing prose all his life. “But you have been speaking prose all your life!” another character explains to the protagonist, trying to yell him why we sometimes forget or imagine something we practice as if it were out of this world or spineless fools. We sometimes speak words without really understanding whether they are in prose or verse and this is bound to lead to some comic effect Moliere exploited in his dramatic work to highlight our foolishness.
Sometimes misunderstandings are born when we, unknowingly or deliberately, distort the meanings of words in our conversations. Although words have meanings that we have conventionally agreed to understand and use in specific ways, these words tend to be used in as many ways as possible and in accordance with subjective preferences. Dictionaries are created in order to give us a list of words and meanings that we all agree to use in useful ways so that we can understand one another and conducted oral or written conversations accordingly.
Language is nothing but a collection of words that are spoken or written in a conventional way so that they can facilitate communication. I remember having read one observation by a renowned writer who said that “Novels are dictionaries written in a disorderly manner” That is to say all books are written with words that are collected in dictionaries although they do not appear in alphabetical order. Misunderstood words are apt to create chaos and misunderstanding in daily interactions.
People had started to speak to one another even before they could write and read but the invention of the written word has added a new dimension to human relationships and led to higher level of cultural development. The invention of the written word, was in the words of Wikipedia encyclopedia a colossal development for languages although it is a relatively recent discovery. Humanity has existed for many millennia but writing is relatively recent discovery. “The earliest known writing was invented around 3400 B.C. in an area known as Sumer near the perisna Gulf. The development of the Sumerian script was influenced by local materials such as clay for tablets and reeds for styluses writing.”
According to another information, “Archeological discoveries in ancient Mesopotamia (now mostly modern Iraq) show the initial power and purpose of writing, from administrative and legal functions to poetry and literature.
Almost all linguists agree that language is something dynamic that changes with time and circumstances. In times of deep social and political changes,new words and new concepts enter and join the political and social lexicon. Revolutionary changes as well as reforms bring with them changes at least in the vocabulary of a given language that are used to express the new realties. Over the last fifty or so years, Ethiopia has undergone at least two major systemic changes, namely the Revolution of 1974 and the Reform of 1918.
In the process, language absorbs those changes in word expressions to facilitate communication and understanding. The trouble comes when words are taken out of context and their meaning are embraced by some and rejected by others. This too can be resolved through discussions and it should be the duty of linguists to come forward and explain the source and real meanings of the new words to ordinary folks before damage is done to society and country because new words, unless properly understood, are most likely to give birth to new contradictions sooner or later.
The Ethiopian Herald December 10/2022
