Tamara

In the Tamazight language of Morocco, the word for spider is tamara. A beautiful word for a crafty and intelligent creature. Granted, spiders as a rule are not considered attractive, but I do respect their skill and patience. I carefully avoid tearing their webs as I harvest berries and green beans each day. The only spiders I have no tolerance for are the leggy yellow-green ones that kill honey bees. As honey bees work so hard to produce the medicinal honey, I try very hard to protect them from this  particularly nasty spider. It is fun for me to observe how we react to words, even words that are foreign to us, like the Tamazight word for spider, tamara. To me, my reaction to the sounds of this word were positive, pleasant. The word tamara reminds me of a cool German science-fiction show when I was a kid, where one of the lead female characters was called Tamara. I also like the Tamazight word for rabbit, awunin, It is , in sound very close to the Flemish dialect for rabbit, konyn. I always like it when I discover that we as humans in all our diversity, which can drive us apart with suspicion, have things in common, and the history of language certainly can be an encouraging place to find communality. Maybe that  is why I love languages so much,and why I always want to learn more about them , because they shed light on our humanity, on our experience in that humanity. The more  I learn, the more I realize we have a lot in common, if nothing else, linguistically. If we have the willingness to communicate, to meet each other halfway, a lot of conflicts may become more readily solvable. If we are ultimately brothers and sisters as a human family, we certainly are when you study languages. The further back you go in time, the more languages are related. It is cool, encouraging. If we have language in common, we really should be able to understand each other on larger cultural and political levels. It just brings a smile to my face that in this tense world politically, riddled with suspicion and dubious rhetoric, I know that one of my favorite animals when I was a child, the rabbit, which I called konyn in my West Flemish dialect, is called awunin in Tamazight, and that I can relate to that emotionally, culturally. Go grab a dictionary, and look up some words in a language you are not familiar with. You might surprise yourself, and the world around you.