Tears!

Amadou keeps referring to the guinea fowls’ feathers as “tears.” The other day he needed to remove the “tears” again so the guinea fowl wouldn’t fly over the fence (yes, they are still living in my backyard. yes, I still love them).

At first I thought this was just another case of mistakenly memorized vocabulary, like how I used to have trouble keeping “subaka” and “sukabe” apart, even though there’s not much similarity between the sun and children. Then I realized, I don’t actually know how to say “tears” in Pulaar! Maybe the word for “feathers” and “tears” is the same? The word for feathers, “leebi,” doesn’t really refer specifically to feathers anyway. It’s more a word for something shed from a body. Feathers are “leebi,” but so is dog fur, and the assorted debris that falls from mango trees.

And what do people shed? Tears.

The Pulaar dictionary neither confirmed nor denied this hypothesis, having no entry for tear (n.) other than the sort of tear that results when clothes rip. So I’ll just have to wait for some kid to start crying.