I saw a rave for the restaurant Çka Ka Qëllu and of course my immediate reaction was “What does that mean in Albanian?” A couple of sites claim it’s “an old proverb meaning ‘what we happen to have,’” which I presume is the restaurateur’s explanation; this review has a more elaborate version:
When directly translated to English, the phrase “Çka Ka Qëllu” means nothing, but in Albanian the phrase represents the principle of giving all that is left and treating visitors as your own blood. The Albanian people are people of honor and despite often having lived in poverty in their country of origin, they never fail to offer all that they had to those who come their way. In an interview conducted by Danielle Lehman, a journalist for Tableside Magazine, Ramiz Kukaj explained, “being that they didn’t have enough and we were poor, if a neighbor passed by your house it would be embarrassing if you didn’t invite them in for a coffee, lunch or dinner. This was our tradition; we would always invite people in. We would say, ‘Come in for bread, salt, and…’ we say the heart and love and everything that’s left” (Kukaj).
But what I want is a literal, morpheme-by-morpheme exegesis. Wiktionary tells me that çka is ‘what’; ka can mean ‘from, out, out of, to’ or ‘who, whom’ (it is also a noun meaning ‘ox; steer,’ but that seems implausible here) [but it’s also the third-person singular present indicative of kam ‘to have,’ which is presumably the relevant sense — thanks, earthtopus!]; qëlloj means ‘to hit; to beat; to gain, obtain’ — presumably the last is the relevant sense, but I can’t find a form qëllu in the conjugation chart. Any Albanianists in the crowd?
(If I somehow got there, I would definitely order the Suxhuk Në Tavë, “A handcrafted blend of ground veal and beef sausage sautéed in olive oil, melted in a velvety fusion of three artisanal cheeses.”)
I’ve had lunch at the Bronx location. Happy to go back if any out-of-town Hattics want to make the pilgrimage.
Lucky you!
The sign at the Murray Hill location used to read Çka Ka Qëllue with -ue. Don’t know about now. The website still has this spelling for this location.
Colloquial Kosovar Gheg participle in -ue, -u (Standard qëlluar)?
Ah, that makes sense! I wonder why the shortened and presumably incorrect/nonstandard spelling has taken over?
The third etymology on Wiktionary for “ka” says it’s the third person singular present active indicative of a verb meaning to have, and can mean “there is” (presumably like French “il y a”); so something like “what there is [is for the] taking?”
I missed that — thanks, and I’ll add it to the post.
We would say, ‘Come in for bread, salt, and…’ we say the heart and love and everything that’s left
This is the formulation in the corpus of laws known as Kanun i Lekë Dukagjinit. In the edition of Shtjefën Gjeçovi:
The University of Texas site has notes on this here.
https://doi.org/10.36941/jesr-2025-0068 suggests Kostandin Kristoforidhi used qëllu:
Still can’t Google any non restaurant “Çka Ka Qëll*”
There was (is?) a place in Tel Aviv selling ready-made prepered food (like Pret a Manger in the UK), called יש אוכל בבית yesh ókhel babáyit ‘there’s food at home’. The plain meaning is that they have goods with which to fill an empty refrigerator. The subtext is a certain kind of parent or grandparent, who used that very phrase to nix any suggestion of eating out as a pointless waste of money. The association for me was clear and immediate, and presumably so for others.
-u is the 2nd sg imperative ending in the mediopassive, and that’s my first guess for what is going on here. In the standard language, or in descriptions of the nonstandard Geg dialects that approach the standard language, one would expect the combination qëlloh + u, but there are examples from Geg dialects of intervocalic h being lost.
I’m currently in southern Albania and also reading Ismail Kadare’s novel Prilli i thyer about blood feuds. The backwards, isolated mountains of Northern Albania and Montenegro, and Kosovo, were a whole different world from Kadare’s upbringing in the other part of the country that was as cosmopolitan and connected to the wider world and its mores as Albania could get, and Kadare’s novel reads rather like an anthropological study of a foreign culture. It has got me thinking a lot about how potentially misleading Albanian stereotypes can be; wouldn’t it be weird if European commentators had treated late 1800s Appalachian feuds as “American culture” to the exclusion of everything else from coast to coast?
I think that if things had turned out better for Albania in the twentieth century, the image of its people abroad would be very different indeed. After all, descriptions of Bosniaks, Montenegrins and Serbs written a century ago or more ago commonly feature some stereotypes that are no longer current, they fell by the wayside as Yugoslavia developed.
I don’t know if “people of honor” is the optimal way to express that very strong ethic of “hospitality,” where someone who is in Official Host Role has very very strong moral/cultural obligations to whoever is in Official Guest Role – this is as I understand it fairly common cross-culturally and often/especially in cultures that live in difficult/challenging material circumstances. (There’s a not-literally-a-miracle-but-still-spiritually-instructive story about St. Olga of Kwethluk that makes no sense unless you understand the background strength of that ethic in Yupik culture and thus how badly it was being challenged by the primary actor in the story and thus how saintly it was for St. Olga to work with that situation pragmatically and compassionately rather than condemn it or turn away in shock and horror.)
I have a vague/impressionistic sense that the Albanian-speaking diaspora in the NYC area is overweight Kosovars, and this presumably has some impact on whatever is theoretically non-standard about how they use the language.
St. Olga of Kwethluk is a great name, and I learn from Wikipedia that Kwethluk is /ˈkwiːθlʊk/ KWEETH-luuk (representing Central Yupik Kuiggluk). Odd that there’s no mention of Olga on that page; she must surely be the most prominent person associated with the town (Wikipedia calls it a city, but the population is 721, and I don’t call that a city).
This is an 18.5 minute clip of footage from a visit to Kwethluk in March 2024 by outside ecclesiastical folks interested in speaking to locals about their personal memories of St. Olga. I commend it not for any spiritual/theological substance but for the quite fascinating accent(s) in which the locals speak English, which as best as I can tell is/are quite different from how white folks speak English in the more metropolitan parts of Alaska. (There are also a few stretches where locals are speaking Yupik.) The context of this visit, I think, was the interest of the outside authorities in digging up St. Olga’s mortal remains (now reconceptualized as “relics”) and “translating” them (to use the medieval verb …) to the cathedral in Anchorage where they would be more easily accessible to pilgrims from the wider world. The locals reacted negatively to this concept, which seems to have been abandoned in favor of figuring out how to work on infrastructure to make Kwethluk more accessible to future pilgrims. There are extant photos of St. Olga but I don’t know if anyone has audio of her speaking voice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww4th4PSJ4Q&t=233s
/ˈkwiːθlʊk/ KWEETH-luuk (representing Central Yupik Kuiggluk).
I think the Yupik pronunciation would be [kuixɬuk] or so.
Ed.: in JWB’s linked video (6:59–7:11) I hear [kwiɬuk]. I don’t hear a [x] = <gg>.
Suxhuk Në Tavë
Albanian has the best digraphs.
Yes, I used to think Albanian was the closest we could get to xenolinguistics until I encountered the languages of the Pacific Northwest. (Come back, marie-lucie!)
One of the items in Çka Ka Qëllu‘s menu is “veal muscles” (explained as goulash). Startling yet straightforward.
Once /dz/ has been assigned the letter X, the rest just logically follows.
I see “Albanian trileçe, creamy dessert made with three types of milk,” among the desserts. My guess is that New York Albanians adopted their hispanohablante neighbors’ tarta de tres leches. I wonder if it has made its way back to Albania.
The top looks browner than in the Latin American version, something like a Turkish kazandibi. That may be what makes it Albanian.
I wonder if it has made its way back to Albania.
T’other way round is also a possibility, i.e. it was there first:
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Sin embargo, otros dicen que el húmedo pastel de Nicaragua se originó en una región lejos de Latinoamérica.
Los norteamericanos y sudamericanos lo conocen como tres leches, un pastel festivo de celebración con raíces hispanas. Pero yo lo descubrí este verano en los Balcanes, donde se llama trilece o trileqe (la grafía albanesa) y se pronuncia ‘tree-leh-che’». El bloguero Blair Kilpatrick escribe: » … Entonces, ¿cuál es la diferencia? Si es que hay alguna, ¿entre el pastel de tres leches americano/hispano y el trilece al estilo balcánico? Yo sugeriría que se reduce a dos elementos críticos: la cobertura y la textura.
#
Kazandibi is actually the chicken breast pudding that has stuck to the sides and bottom of the pan while cooking.
1-Hat: I am surprised. The languages of the Caucasus (which, as an Indo-Europeanist-in-training, I assume you first grew acquainted with long before you grew acquainted with those of the Pacific Northwest) strike me as just as extra-terrestrial-looking as those of the Pacific Northwest -and as an added bonus, you have the Armenian and Georgian scripts -plus the Old Albanian* one-which also look as though they come from another world.
(Will relay your shout-out to Marie-Lucie when I next see her/write to her).
2-CuConnacht: Quoth Wikipedia (I know, I know….), you are correct as to the direction of the culinary borrowing, but not as to the place where the borrowing took place: apparently Albanian “trileçe” was borrowed from “tres leches” in Albania itself, and thence spread to neighboring Balkan countries and Turkey (And, presumably, was already known to Albanian migrants coming to New York).
Whether subsequent coexistence in the Big Apple of these Albanian migrants and Spanish-speaking ones led to any specifically New York features common to local “trileçe”/”tres leches” desserts (AKA A culinary Sprachbund -or would it be more appropriate to call it a Zungebund here? David Marjanović, are you reading this?) is a matter which…considerable empirical field research in Albanian- and Hispanic-owned restaurants and bakeries of the area appears to be urgently called for.
3-“trileçe”/”tres leches” is intriguing to me for another reason, however: wherever the borrowing/adaptation was made, why was the Spanish “tres leches” not adapted into Albanian as *”treleçe”? Albanian “three” is TRE for masculines and TRI for feminines (The only numeral which inflects for gender in Standard Albanian, although this was not true of Proto-Albanian or some dialects of Albanian today).
I assume that synchronically the “leçe” component of “trileçe” is at best a cranberry morph in Albanian, and thus I would have expected that in adapting Spanish “tres” to Albanian the masculine TRE would have been chosen, as the phonologically closest form to the Spanish TRES.
Thoughts, anyone?
*Hmmph! The only Language Hat comment where both the Balkan and the Caucasian Albanians are mentioned, possibly!
Hat: I am surprised. The languages of the Caucasus (which, as an Indo-Europeanist-in-training, I assume you first grew acquainted with long before you grew acquainted with those of the Pacific Northwest) strike me as just as extra-terrestrial-looking as those of the Pacific Northwest
True, of course (though not the part about me as an Indo-Europeanist-in-training — we had enough to deal with in IE, we didn’t spend any time on other families), but as it happens I entered the Caucasus via the gateway of Georgian, which I experienced via the cinema (specifically, Repentance/მონანიება [Monanieba]), so it came to me as an actual language I wanted to learn, not an alien-looking collection of letters. Similarly, Japanese is haimish to me, not alien, because I was born and partly raised in Japan.
Heh. Zungenbund is a good idea, and I can suggest a few more (e.g. Czechia and all its surroundings – Silesian food is mostly just like home)…
dare i assume “trileçe” entered albanian through ladino/judezmo? if so, it’s possible that could explain the vowel – according to joseph nehama’s judezmo-french dictionary (which i believe is a salonika-centered effort), “léče” takes “la”.
Rozele: It is “la leche” in Spanish too, so whether “tres leches” entered Albanian via Ladino/Judezmo or through more mainstream forms of Spanish, the problem remains the same.
Hmm. If, as I suspected above, “leçe” in Albanian is a cranberry morph, perhaps “tri” instead of “tre” is a purely phonetic adaptation: I know many varieties of Ladino/Judezmo neutralize the /e/ – /i/ distinction in pretonic position, in which case, if the initial syllable of “tres leches” was realized in a given Ladino/Judezmo variety as /tri(s)/, then Albanian /tri/ may not owe its vowel to the grammatical gender of “leche” but to the realization of “tres” in the source language.
Incidentally, “milk” in Albanian is “qumësht”, and is a masculine noun: All the more reason to expect Spanish “tres leches” to be borrowed as *”treleçe” instead of the attested “trileçe”.
wouldn’t it be weird if European commentators had treated late 1800s Appalachian feuds as “American culture” to the exclusion of everything else from coast to coast?
It’s still what a lot of the world thinks of first regarding Appalachian culture, if not American. John Fox, Jr. casts a long shadow. (Second, Jesse Stuart.)
Before that, of course, Europeans got their ideas about America from James Fenimore Cooper.
Any hypothesized Ladino pathway would seem to imply that the “tres leches” dessert is so old it could would have been known to the Sephardim before their 15th-century exile from Iberia. But wikipedia, at least, seems to think the dish originated in Hispanophone parts of the New World rather more recently although one can find arguable antecedents in multiple parts of medieval Europe. As to the Albanian lexeme, “The exact origins of Trilece are debated. However, the most likely explanation is that the popularity of Mexican soap operas in Albania led local chefs to reverse-engineer the Tres Leches cake, which then spread to Turkey, Bosnia and Herzegovina and other Southeastern European countries.” I’m going to guess that telenovelas were not readily accessible to Albanians until after the Hoxha regime had fallen from power?
Here’s a Russian recipe for Трилече, said to be an Albanian dish, although similar to things found in Mexico, France, and Spain. https://shuba.life/ru/recipes/9592-trileche-albanskij-molochnyj-pirog
J.W. Brewer: A Ladino/Judezmo etymology for Albanian “trileçe” needn’t imply that “tres leches” was present in the speech of Ladino/Judezmo speakers in the late fifteenth century! I agree that if the term is due to Mexican telenovelas then Ladino/Judezmo is probably not part of the transmission chain.
But at an earlier date transmission from Latin America to Spain and thence to Albanian via some variety of Ladino/Judezmo (and perhaps some other language(s)) is certainly possible, and indeed may be heuristically necessary if we want to explain why the initial syllable of the Albanian word is /tri/ and not */tre/.
Hmm. In fact, the transmission chain needn’t have included Ladino/Judezmo: All that was needed was a language which would have raised pre-tonic /e/ to /i/, but left final unstressed /e/ unscathed (as a language with unstressed /e/ raised to /i/ in all positions would have yielded an Albanian form *trileçi”).
So, fellow hatters: Any candidates? I first thought of Northern dialects of Greek, but in these varieties, as I understand it, /a/ /i/ and /u/ are the only possible unstressed vowels in unstressed position (diachronically, earlier unstressed /i/ and /u/ were lost -yielding some new consonant clusters and word-final consonants- with unstressed /e/ and /o/ subsequently raised to /i/ and /u/, respectively). Thus a Northern Greek immediate source would have yielded the non-existent form *trileçi.
” But at an earlier date transmission from Latin America to Spain and thence to Albanian via some variety of Ladino/Judezmo (and perhaps some other language(s)) is certainly possible,…”
People forget that Spaniards ruled southern Italy for a long time, at the same time that they ruled wide swaths of the New World. It isn’t very far from southern Italy to Albania. That said, I think that the telenovela theory is more likely.
Greek masculine nouns lose their suffix when loaned into Albanian (see e.g. here.) Could tres leches have lost the -es by analogy to Greek?
Greek itself would not be the intermediate source, because the [tʃ] would have become [ts], yielding *trilece.
As a perceptive albeit fictional little girl might have put it, curiouser and curiouser!
This site-
https://www.zoneturizmi.com/post/nga-cili-vend-e-kan%C3%AB-origjin%C3%ABn-%C3%ABmb%C3%ABlsirat-trile%C3%A7e
-claims that Italy was an intermediate step in the transmutation of Mexican Spanish “tres leches” into “trileçe”, making me wonder -if the claim is true- whether the shift from /tre(s)/ to /tri/ might be a simple case of morphological substitution: assuming -I am nothing if not consistent- “leçe” has the status of a cranberry morph, could “tri” simply be the Italian prefix TRI-? If we are dealing with a case of morphological substitution, it would explain “trileçe” perfectly.
I could be wrong but I’m guessing that at least the earlier Mexican telenovelas that popped up available to an Albanian audience were likely not dubbed into Albanian but might have been subtitled (because cheaper). Who knows how the subtitlers (and same would go for dubbers …) would have initially handled references to referents common in Mexico but without an obvious Albanian analogue? If you could find early videotape evidence of a telenovela episode in which “tres leches” had come up in the Spanish dialogue, it would be very interesting to see how the subtitles first handled that particular Spanish NP.
Just to add to the possibilities, this article says that pastel de tres leches went straight from “South America” to Turkey by way of soap operas, though it also mentions the possibility of a stop in Albania.
(I just had some for the first time last month. I’m not a big fan of cakes, especially simple white and yellow ones, but I liked it better than most. Goat’s milk would be a big improvement.)
After a little more poking around online it appears that the Brazilian telenovela _Escrava Isaura_ (originally aired ’76-’77) may have been the first to be a success in what we used to call the Eastern Bloc and managed to do so over the course of the ’80’s while the Cold War was still in progress: first in Hungary, then in Poland, then in multiple other places. Including still-Communist Albania. Allegedly a rumor and/or joke was that Tefta Cami, Hoxha’s minister of culture and education who left office in ’87, had gone to the tv station so that she could get a preview of the big-finale episode before it was aired. But it still may have not been until the nineties that it became routine and you got more Mexican product. (I read elsewhere that some ridiculously high percentage of the population of the dissolving Soviet Union in ’91-’92 watched the Mexican telenovela _Los ricos tambien lloran_ as the old order was passing away.)
That and Santa Barbara.
at least one 1990s balkan roma band had a telenovela theme in its repertoire – which would mean more for this whole question if i could remember whether it was one of the serbian or macedonian bands or a romanian group. (and there were also some filmi tunes in the mix, if i remember right – the post-ottoman cultural ekumene has a kind of eclecticism that makes a lot of sense to me, though i’m not sure i could describe the logic i feel underlying it)
“it appears that the Brazilian telenovela _Escrava Isaura_ (originally aired ’76-’77) may have been the first to be a success in what we used to call the Eastern Bloc…”
That telenovela aired in the U.S. too. During the 80’s. It aired dubbed in Spanish on what must have still been SIN ( Spanish International Network ) at the time before it became Univision. I know this because my mother watched it every night. It was a popular telenovela.
This thread is funny to me because I was just thinking of pastel de tres leches all this past weekend.
I’m guessing that at least the earlier Mexican telenovelas that popped up available to an Albanian audience were likely not dubbed into Albanian but might have been subtitled
I would have guessed Albanians in the early 1990s were subjected to the same “male voice-over translating all the dialogue” that Russians, Poles were subjected to. That is by far the cheapest option. In most of CEE in the 1990s cinema releases might have been subtitled but VHS bootlegs and “cheap television” like a telenovela almost always got the single actor or maybe, if you were very lucky, “one male and one female” actor treatment
I read elsewhere that some ridiculously high percentage of the population of the dissolving Soviet Union in ’91-’92 watched the Mexican telenovela _Los ricos tambien lloran_ as the old order was passing away.
I can attest its popularity; I remember being invited to a dinner in Vilnius in the early 90s where the ladies present asked me (as the special guest from the West) whether I would mind them switching on the TV and watching that show during the meal, which I didn’t object to, to their great joy. I don’t remember anything of the characters or plot, or even whether it was dubbed or subtitled, only that they watched it on the main Soviet channel and referred to it with its Russian name (“Bogatye tozhe plachut”, a straight translation of the Spanish name.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice-over_translation — leads on to the Andrey Gavrilov “Blood and Concrete” meme
Where?
I don’t think “leads on to” means that it’s in that article but rather that it follows from “Gavrilov, for instance, was usually heard in action films”; you can read the famous Gavrilov «Кровь и бетон» quote here.
I wonder why the shortened and presumably incorrect/nonstandard spelling has taken over?
The owners preferred the form in -u as being the typically Kosovar form? From Matthew C. Curtis, ‘The dialectology of Albanian’, ch. 99 in Jared Klein et al., eds. (2018) Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics, vol. 3, on the topic of Tosk -uar ~ Geg -ue, -u :
The ADA is Gjinari et al. (2007−2008) Albanian Dialect Atlas.
My thought was that ka qëllu(e) was just a regular Geg present perfect. It would be equivalent to Standard Albanian ka qëlluar, the regularly formed 3rd sg. present perfect indicative of qëlloj. The ka would be the 3rd pres. indic. of kam ‘have’, regularly used as the auxiliary in the perfect system. In this instance, qëlloj might be in impersonal (pavetor) use—see definition 9 here. To be interpreted idiomatically as ‘has happened, has chanced (to be)’?
(My first attempt at an interpretation had been ‘What has he shot?’. That is, ‘What has my husband or my son shot on the mountain today for dinner? Quail, doves, partridges, rabbit…?’.)
The owners preferred the form in -u as being the typically Kosovar form?
Thanks, that makes sense.
Ah.
English version: “An illegal Russian voice-over version (voiced by Andrey Gavrilov) of the scene at the beginning of the film where Mort insults Joey Turks for thirty seconds has become a popular meme on the Russian internet.[5][6]” Sadly lacking from the Welsh version, though the Catalan one has it.
I was looking for a thread in which to deposit an even more preposterous “translation”. Any Kwak’wala specialists who can help with this from the Guardian?
“The IPCA was established in 2022 “based on the ancient concept of ‘Aweenak’ola’, which translates as ‘we are one with the land, sea and sky and supernatural Ones and have a responsibility to care for all the beings’”.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/27/canada-british-columbia-texada-island-grizzly
I can’t help with your question, but I’ll bet “Aweenak’ola” is the name of that belief, the way Judaism is the name of the belief that there is one God, named Yahweh (but don’t say it), who chose the Jews to be made holy by his commandments. Roughly speaking.
Ooh! I must try this for my forthcoming Guardian article!
“There I met Awini, whose name translates as ‘the spiritual power infusing human beings and the great trees of the African savannah, and ultimately extending to the entire universe.'”
I suspect my slightly over-the-top rendering of the Kusaal word win “spiritual individuality of someone/something” is rather closer to the linguistic reality than this Grauniad atrocity. Why do people do this?
(Actually, I suspect that some of these things in North America originate from semispeakers. I saw an Objibwe site once that got very excited about the deep philosophical implications of the fact that Ojibwe, uniquely among languages, one gathered, used impersonal verbs to describe the weather. )
Still annoyed by the blether surrounding the Zulu word ubuntu “humanity.” Here too, I think a fair bit of the mystical overinterpretation actually comes from the speakers themselves, rather than outsiders who’ve fallen prey to the African analogue of Orientalism.
I assume the Ubuntuist sense of “ubuntu” is just parallel to words like “socialism” or “communism” having developed specific elaborated-and-often-contested meanings, although maybe IE speakers are less likely to read those modern ideological connotations back into the earlier (or still-extant-in-parallel) meanings of “social” or “communal” or what have you.
I like the alternate label “Hunhuism” for the ideology (from what I take to be the Shona cognate of Xhosa/Zulu “ubuntu”), but I suppose post-1980 Zimbabwe did not in the long run seem like such a shining example to be emulated that it was a good advertisement for the local name. (And I don’t know that the actual regime in power in Zimbabwe gave much long-term lip service to Hunhuism as a legitimating ideology.)
Actually, this site gives “the lands we are on”, which seems much more likely:
https://nanwakolas.com/
I assume the Ubuntuist sense of “ubuntu” is just parallel to words like “socialism” or “communism” having developed specific elaborated-and-often-contested meanings
Quite so: just as the multifarious senses of “humanity” can’t be understood by mere etymology either. What I object to is in fact a sort of reverse-etymological fallacy: the idea that ubuntu, a perfectly regular abstract noun from umuntu “person”, intrinsically has all the elevated meanings attributed to it Because Africa. (One encounters this sort of thing with Welsh words too, generally in English contexts: hiraeth, bro … )
“Zulu/Welsh/Kwak’wala/[insert exotic language of choice] has a word for it.” Yurgh. It’s bloody patronising when outsiders do it, and fantasy posturing when speakers do it. Anathema!
Maarten Kossmann, just the other day:
Other weisenheimer riffs on the theme follow.
As far as I can tell, none of the Oti-Volta languages seems to have felt any need to create an abstract noun from “person” (proto-Oti-Volta *nîtwá.) In the “oikumene” sense, they mostly have derivatives of Arabic دنيا, and in the “being nice to one another because we’re all in this together” senses they have lots of perfectly good expressions unrelated etymologically to “person.”
It seems that the Southern African creators of “Ubuntuism” may have have mistaken Southern Africa for all of Africa …
(I can’t say that I am totally persuaded that only in Africa is it commonly held that human beings fundamentally express their true nature in participating in communities. This seems to me to be on much the same level as the pervasive Brit belief that only Brits really have the concept of “fair play.”)
Aristotle was obviously channeling the Ancient Wisdom of a certain branch of the Bantu family tree when he made essentially the same point from a different angle as (to arbitrarily cut-and-paste one translation rather than any of a number of others …) “One who is incapable of participating or who is in need of nothing through being self-sufficient is no part of a city, and so is either a beast or a god.” “City” is Englishing πόλις, which could well be translated as “society” given where A. is going with it, i.e. this is part of the “political animal” discussion, which does not mean “urban animal” as opposed to “social animal.”
Having said that, a major part of my own culture shock on moving to Ghana was discovering that people are bound by many more ties of obligation to one another than in the society I grew up in, where that degree of mutual obligation is pretty much confined to close family. It took me quite a while to sort out how much of the many calls for my financial or moral support was entirely in accord with local cultural norms and how much of it was people taking advantage of a newbie. (It turned out to be overwhelmingly more the former, though initially it mostly seemed like the latter to me.) It was very destabilising for me for my first year there.
But I also came to see that all this was really the human default setting. It was the culture I’d grown up in that was weird.
I can see how Southern Africans, faced with this weird but prestigious culture borne by the colonialists, could make the error of seeing the weird culture as the human norm and thinking of their own culture as more distinctive than it really is (in this respect) from a larger perspective.
(There are some pretty weird cultures in Africa, too. Big place, Africa.)
As opposed to Little England.
Indeed. Lloegr Fach, as the natives call it.