Marshall - The old way : a story of the first people

The five groups of San or Bushmen are called the First People. Most call themselves Bushmen when referring to themselves collectively. I respect this and use the term Bushman rather than San in the text. Two groups appear in this book, the Ju/wasi (the singular is Ju/wa) and the /Gwi. Although today some of these people read and write, they had no say in the spelling of their language, which has been chosen by others. The Ju part of Ju/wa might better be spelled Zhu, following the International Phonetic Alphabet, but it isnt, because when Lorna Marshall, my mother, wrote the first important ethnography of these people, she rendered the j of ju as the French j of je or jolie. Others have followed her example. Today, her j rendition seems to be standard.

Meanwhile, the /wa part of Ju/wa is also spelled /hoan, also /hoan, as was eventually suggested by linguists in an attempt to reproduce the phonic subtleties. My spelling is therefore somewhat archaic, as most academic publications now favor Ju/hoan (also Ju/hoan and Ju/hoan). But to the average reader, the word would appear to be pronounced Jew-ho-an or Jew-honenever mind the slash mark and the apostrophe. Missionaries with linguistic inclinations determined the spelling of the Fijian language with similar results. For instance, an important Fijian beverage made from kava and pronounced yang-gona is spelled yaqona. Many of us would take that for yak-kwona.

The same fate seems to await the Bushman languages. If only the linguists would settle for approximate, layman-type spellings such as are used for other African languages. That way, although not every nuance is represented on paper, the word looks something like it sounds. All else quickly gets confusing.

And its only the Western world that cares about our spelling. I used to work for the Embassy of the State of Kuwait and will always remember asking an important Saudi personage how, in preparing correspondence for his signature, I should spell his name. He said, Spell it any way you like.

Today, Ju/hoan and Ju/hoan are pretty much in the literature, but they look so very much like Jew-hone, while to the laymans ear the actual word sounds so much more like Ju/wa, that for the sake of the readers this book uses the latter version.

The language of the Ju/wasi belongs to a language group called !Kung, (the u as in pull) and the Ju/wasi are also sometimes known as the !Kung. This language, like all Bushman languages, uses clicks. The dental click (/) resembles the sound we represent as tsk, as in tsk tsk. The alveolar click () is somewhat the same but farther back in the mouth, where t and d come from. The alveol-palatal click (!) has no corresponding sound on our part and is made by pressing the tongue against the top of the mouth and popping it down. And the lateral click (//), made in the cheek, resembles the click one makes to urge a horse.

Interestingly, the Ju/wasi had relatively few personal names in use because their lifestyle fostered small, partially isolated populations in which people were inevitably named for relatives. The approximately 550 people in the areas we studied had forty-one personal names for women and forty-eight for men. We knew twenty-three men named Gao and eighteen women named /Khoa, for instance, which meant that in any group there could be several people with the same name. We even knew two brothers who had the same name, having been named for two different men who also had the same name. People did not have surnames, but certain people had distinguishing nicknamessome honorary, such as Male Toma, others descriptive, such as Lame Gao, Short /Kwi, and Crooked /Kwi; some calling attention to a special physical feature such as Gao Beard, Bau Shortface, Gao Feet, and Toma Longface; some to commemorate an event, such as Tsamko Bone Arrow; and some mildly pejorative, such as Lazy /Kwi. These and others appear in the manuscript.

Today, most of the Ju/wasi have surnames, usually the fathers name. The eldest son of Male Toma was named Tsamko, for example, and now is Tsamko Toma. His eldest son, named for his grandfather, is Toma Tsamko.