Naming powers: Hausa tsafi and Tiv tsav

Abstract

Hausa and Tiv words for occult power, tsafi and tsav, look very similar; is this coincidental, or is there a historical reason? If there is some historical connection, then did one people borrow the root from the other directly, or has something more complex occurred for which a resemblance between tsav and tsafi provides only part of the evidence? Reasoning from wide comparisons and from the grammatical and phonological structures of Hausa and Tiv, we suggest that while tsafi can be added to previously recognized early loans – notably ‘fire’, ‘meat’ and ‘two’ – from Benue-Congo languages to an ancestor of Hausa, the loan was not necessarily from an ancestor of Tiv, and could have been made from another language that had undergone erosion of its noun classes in the same way as Tiv. What kind of transcultural event might have occasioned the borrowing of a term for occult power? Because the loan occurred in the distant past, a specific response to this question is difficult. Hausa...