Sephiroth and Related/Nearby Words

While making a list of unusual or fairly rare words, I came across the Hebrew term sephiroth, familiar to any who have studied the Kabbalah, indicating the series of emanations from the divine to the created world, emanations through which humanity is able to understand the invisible, to enter into connection with the ineffable. But before I tell you any more about that word/concept, I realized that my eyes were drawn away by the "glittering" attractiveness of nearby words, and I had to stop and give them their due. This essay considers sephiroth's neighbors. A later one brings us into the holy of holies of that Hebrew word.

Separatrix and Separatum

Let's begin with separatrix. When I saw this word at first, I thought it must refer to a female who does something, since and administratrix or executrix is a female administrator of an estate, for example. But in fact, it is a slash mark, the solidus or virgule, which originally was used to indicate a fraction. The OED says that it originally was an L, later an I, which indicated a fraction. Later still, as we know, decimals were used. But since a separator is something that divides or separates one thing from another (grain-separator; cream-separator), why is a line separating numbers called a separatrix? What is "female" about it? I don't have a clue.

While being unable to answer that question, my eye fell to the next word, an interesting one, separatum. It is, as we immediately see, something that is "separated," but what is it, specifically? The word only goes back to 1892 and means "a copy or reprint of an article published as part of a larger work, issued for separate distribution." Ah, it is the "individual author's article," usually sent to you by the publisher, so that you can distribute it to all your friends or people you are trying to impress. We called it a "reprint" in my day in academia, but originally it was called a separatum. In my judgment reprint isn't as precise as separatum, since reprint usually indicates the (re)printing of a work in its entirety while a separatum is a reprint of an individual article. Well, I will leave the ship well before it goes down on this one, but it is nice to have that difference in mind.

Sepedi

I was going to plow right ahead to the next interesting word in the Century, but my eye fell upon Sepedi in the OED, and I decided to take a little visit there. Sepedi is "the Northern Sotho language spoken by the Pedi people" (South Africa). My first reaction was to think that this must be an extremely small group, numbering only in the hundreds or thousands, but, as this web site says, it is spoken by "4,208,980" individuals in the Mpumalanga, Gauteng and Limpopo provinces. I am impressed that the number can be calculated so precisely, but the real point, of couse, is that it is an active and life-giving culture. The site says that the language is "very closely connected with the Setswana and Sesotho languages." If I ever discover my "inner anthropologist," I am sure this language and culture wil be on the top of my list...

A few words that are connected with this culture are lebola, warra, and molimo/modimo. Only the last is in any dictionary I have seen. But in the belief that learning another's words is the means by which we enter their world, let's begin with lebola. The aforementioned site defines it as part of the preparations for the marriage ceremony.

"What happens here is the bride’s family, normally her mother and father, request certain items from the groom’s parents in exchange for their daughter. The items that are normally asked for are things like money and livestock, but they can literally ask for anything. If they would like a bottle of brandy, they can ask for that, or a television, whatever they ask for, the groom’s parents cannot refuse otherwise their son may not marry whom he wishes to marry."

I am sure you can imagine a number of humorous scenarios if the "lebola virus" has bitten the bride's family members. Maybe one could do a "Father of the Bride III" movie, with Steve Martin and an African version of Fronk, where lebola negotation would be at the heart of the movie.

That same website gives a primer in a few Sepedi words, just in case your airplane makes an unexpected landing in rural South Africa on the way from San Francisco to NYC. "Hello," for example, is "Dumela," and "Goodbye" is "Gabotse." Useful information. The OED has the following quotation from 1988: "Had I not been told that he was Allie Otto, I would have given him the traditional Sepedi greeting,--'warra'." Unfortunately that the web site doesn't have this traditional greeting, so I am left up in the air on that one.

Then, finally, there is the word Molimo, to which the OED points us on the "Sepedi" entry. The OED informs us that in Southern Sotho (what ever happened to Northern Sotho?) the medial "l," such as in molimo, is not phonetically distinct from the "d," and so the word can also be Modimo. Among the Sotho speakers of eastern/southern Africa, the Molimo is the supreme being or Christian god or, also, an ancestral spirit. I suppose, on further reflection, that it just might be helpful to know which is meant in a particular context, since it was the precise and unremitting effort of the Christian missionaries to differentiate between ancestral spirits and the Christian god. Once we get into the name of Molimo, we enter the fascinating world of African deities and religions--which is not where I want this essay to go.

Wandering from Lebola

But, a funny thing happened on the way to lebola, which itself was a little bit of a digression from the words in the Century which preceded the real word that interested me for the day: sephiroth. I found myself rooting around in the OED in the words surrounding the place where lebola should have been. The next essay takes you on that journey, before delivering you back to the Century.

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