Anyone with knowledge of the history of sports in South Africa and the ways in which it is entangled with its political and social history might be surprised to know that the nicknames for their national Rugby team, the Springboks (Springbokke in Afrikaans, sometimes shortened to Bokke), and their national soccer team, Bafana Bafana (Zulu for “The Boys, the Boys”), are, in essence, the same.
On its surface, this is surprising for a few reasons. In modern South Africa, Rugby has traditionally been viewed as a “White” sport, while soccer has been considered a “Black” sport. Despite this apparent difference, both team names suggest a rambunctious, wild, but not lethal, masculinity: the essence of boyhood. The Zulu term does this directly, while the Afrikaans term needs a bit of interpretation to get there.
How did I find myself in this particular linguistic cul de sac? It all started when I began using the Duolingo app to learn Irish. One of the first words that I was given to learn was buachaill, which means “boy.” I have learned over the years that when assessing a word, one should focus on its core, by which I mean the initial and second consonant sounds, as these are the elements that are most likely to connect to other words in the same language or cognates in other tongues. Vowels tend to shift frequently and endings tend to be unique to each language group or even each language within a group, so I tend to give the former secondary importance and simply ignore the latter.
So, back to buachaill. Like many people, I had long ago made the observation that Irish contained a lot of extra letters, both vowels and silent consonants, so my brain automatically focused on the core of the word, bu(a)ch-, and the English word buck sprang to mind, followed by the phrase young buck. In my experience, this phrase refers to a young man or teenage boy who is acting in an aggressive or cocky manner. I wondered, of course, if buachaill was connected to buck.
As it turns out, they do seem to be related at the Indo-European level. Buck goes back the Old English bucc, which means a male deer. A similar Old English word, bucca, means a male goat. The fact that a very similar word was used to denote the male version of multiple animals indicates that the root word carried the basic connotation of “male”.
Given the fact that English and German are “cousin” languages that sometimes demonstrate close cognates, but are at other times widely divergent, I like to triangulate my etymological thinking by incorporating Scandinavian into the analysis of Germanic words. In this case, it worked surprisingly well in that the Swedish word for “boy” is pojke (pronounced like “poika”). This is an extremely close cognate to bucca if one accounts for two things. First, Swedish often treats the letter “j” (at least unofficially) like a vowel (see hjärta, “heart” and jord, “earth”) and its function in pojke is to act like the English “i” in forming the “oi” diphthong. Second, the “b” sound in English and German often becomes a “p” sound in Swedish (see på, “at”, cognate with bei in German and by, in the sense of nearness, in English). Put in phonetic terms, English and German tend to use a voiced bilabial stop where Swedish tends to use a voiceless one.
This is what I love about investigating the roots and origins of words. Not only do you gain insight into the way related languages developed via subtle phonetic changes, you stumble across pleasing instances of synchronicity that reveal prosaic truths about the world we live in. In this case, sports teams tend to be given names that evoke energetic, dangerous masculinity and this concept has validity across a wide range of languages and cultures.
If you don’t believe me ask the Tampa Bay Buccaneers or the Milwaukee Bucks.
Anarcheologos 