My kids have invented this language. They sort of adapted it after watching The Gods Must Be Crazy, a 1980 movie about a Bushman who discovers a Coke bottle and sets out to throw it off the ends of the earth because it brings his people pain and suffering. Watching this character and his fellow villagers in the Kalahari Desert speaking !Kung really got my kids inspired. So they invented a language similar in sound—gutteral in places, a bit short and sharp, and above all, spoken very fast. This game is called playing “Kalahari Kids.”
Tonight at dinner we had a lengthy discussion about the new language. I asked for a sample sentence. Everyone but Paolo was too embarrassed to give a demonstration. “Uta makalak,” he told me in a very matter-of-fact tone. Vigil informed me that uta means “shut up.” I asked Paolo what indeed he had just said to me. “Uta means ‘look,’” he helpfully pointed out, “and makalak means ‘at this.’ So when I say uta makalak, I am saying, ‘Look at this.’”
“But Vigil just said that uta means ’shut up.’ You’re telling me that uta means ‘look.’ So what does it mean and how can it mean both things?” I queried.
My husband River turned to me and said, “You’re being ethnocentric. You have to understand it in context. Uta can mean more than one thing depending on what you’re talking about. In their culture, ’shut up’ and ‘look’ are two shadings of the same meaning. If you’re talking, you’re not looking.”
Paolo interrupted, “No, UuutthhddAA means ’shut up,’ but UUUTaa means ‘look’.” For some reason we had boiled the essentials of language down to these two elements. I could imagine the kids playing their pretend games, their dialogue consisting only of “shut up” and “look.”
To test the limits of their linguistical capacity I asked them, “How would I say, ‘I have to go to the bathroom’?”
Paolo helpfully volunteered, “Uta makalakaka utaa maku!”
River said, “I think he just said, ‘Shut up and look at my butt!’” Still eating dinner, I added, “No I think he said, ‘Shut up and look at the poop coming out of my butt!’” (Mind you, we were the adults attending this lovely little dinner party, and we tend to have a policy of no potty talk during dinner, but I guess we really blew it this time.) Needless to say it was all downhill from there.