Black

The cow in the main image has a very dark coat. From my perspective this is a black cow. Well, it used to be just black for me, before I got to understand the pastoralists’ worldview. The appearance of this coat is called t'ia. In the appended wordlist of my grammar I translated t'ia as 'black'.

In fact, wouldn't you call all of the three cows in the additional pictures above 'black' as well? And, if so, then according to my wordlist, you would all refer to them as tʼiá in Hamar. But as science does, research yields new questions, pushing us to question our assumptions, leading to new research. By now I know that the second cow is tʼiá labál, because - although the coat is almost entirely t'iá - she has labál, a 'white belly'. The third cow is silbí. Loosely translated, silbí refers to a ‘dark coat with a glossy appearance’ , but in Hamar folk definitions silbí is described as a mixture of deer ‘reddish’ and tʼiá ‘blackish’.

I wanted to understand the meaning of all these terms better, because I wanted to better understand Hamar. So one day I decided to focus on the tʼiá coat. My view started to sharpen when I started to do coloring tasks with Hamar speakers.