Indulge in body butter? Look after your lips with a velvety lip balm? They are made from oil of nuts of the same plant, Vitellaria paradoxa. In English, it is called the shea trea, but guess where this designation hails from? Whichever French-speaking person introduced this word to the French language took inspiration from Wolof, a language spoken in Senegal. In Wolof, the shea trea is called kaarite.
Back in London it is, sadly, much easier to write on African languages than from the continent itself. The obstacles do not only concern internet access, a major hurdle to equitably shared information, but also access to and awareness of printed research. In this regard, African researchers are much more excluded from information flows and access to repositories than their counterparts in the Global North, but the difficulties persist in both directions: it is often impossible to discover, let alone have access, to scientific publications authored and distributed on the African continent especially if they were not created in South Africa.
There are other initiatives, such as ILISS Africa, a German library service providing information on and access to a broad range of information not only on but crucially also from , Africa, on an internet platform. But its funding is temporary, as is that of many initiatives aiming at overcoming the digital divide, and so it is often left to personal connections and sheer luck to fill in the cracks.
In this case, serendipity took the form of a lunch conversation with my Malian host, Prof. I was reporting my taboo hunt form the previous week, and to my delight, Prof.
Minkailou said that he had published an article on euphemisms in Songhay. The data are from Faraw! It turns out that snakes are seen as such distasteful entities that their names β salaamun and gondi β tend not to be pronounced at all.
