How the Creative Class can Help the Dinka Language from Stagnation
4 min readBy Apioth Mayom Apioth, USA
January 5, 2015 (SSB) — I once asked a colleague of mine to tell me what the Dinka called a snow, and he said, “Deng tueny abik,” literally translating to a “rain that pours a flour.” A flour in the sense of the word in that a snow looks powdery in its form. In the above translation, one word, the snow, splintered into three words of Deng, tueny, and abik.
Not that there is something there is something grossly wrong with combining commonplace words to coin new words; it is just that the translation read like a sentence; when it should have been a word to word transaction; with one word begetting an equitably another word.
In its counterpart English, two different words are combined all the time to create new words. Words like shoreline, motorboat, and many more come to mind. Along the same lines, the best translation would have been “dengabik.” Combining commonplace words to coin new words is no a no-brainer indeed, however, creating entirely new words is the best way forward. It helps in enriching our language, thus making it richer and diverse to create space for a culture to expand its horizons.
Globalization is at our doorsteps, and how we filtered it to make it works best for us, rather than allowing it to sweep us away with its junkie’s tidal waves is everyone’s business.
The best stage actors who can help us tremendously in spearheading this initiative are our elders, traditional chieftains, and the creative class, and by the creative class, I mean those who make their living in the arts and entertainment business. Our comedians, singers, and artists reign supreme here. Singers, comedians, and artists are always the first people who get to interact with new technologies and cultural events before everyone else.
In addition, their businesses force them to deal with large audience from time to time. Since the creative class are the first people to interact with new occurrences, they would do us some greater good to come up with new words every time they run into such things, before rushing to sell us their products.
One slight problem about our elders and traditional chieftains is their conservative grip of the culture. They pride themselves as the guardians of the culture; so once a new strange occurrence arrives on the horizon, they are bound to fight it with all their might instead of incorporating and create something new out of it.
On the other hand, they could also be a good untapped resourceful reservoir because their familiarity with the Dinka language could help to come with new words since they would be standing on a familiar ground. That is only if they could open up for the sake of our people.
I could have mentioned our writers without any hesitancy, however, they write in foreign languages such as English and French, and so they are busy enriching those languages with their gifted talents.
Having seen what the other actors are preoccupied with; the major task falls heavily on the creative class to do our bidding. First and foremost, the coinage of new words and the task of incorporating them into a language is not as easy as a child’s play. One of the fastest route to its incorporation into a language is when famous people take the lead and dutifully use their facilitatory means to inject them into their works.
In addition, caution must be taken at all times to avoid creating words that don’t make sense, meaning it would be a total injustice if anyone of this creative class starts creating words out of the blue, and those words happen to be unrelated to anything in the Dinka language, or the Dinka traditions and customs.
A language is a storage granary of a people; it showcases epochal growths of a people, highlighting how we reach our modern times, and a possible guiding framework into the future.
When we are talking about a possible encroachment of a foreign language or an element; we are merely mentioning how we can possibly position ourselves to adapt to those new changes.
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