Later that night, as our guide Jorge and our driver B-man sat around with us and ate dinner at the lodge, I pushed a sheet of paper toward B-man, who was a native speaker of Setswana, and asked him if he could write down the Setswana word for kingfisher for me. (He had tried to teach me the words for “What bird is that?” earlier but my auditory memory is dreadful, so I need to see the words written down. Also, his English was very good but between his accent and my deafness, I wasn’t gonna be able to do it phonetically.)

“I cannot do it,” he said. “I am sorry.”

“…oh,” I said, worried that I had run into some weird cultural gap that I hadn’t seen coming. (Do you not ask people to write down bird names? I’d managed to remember that when you hand someone money, you clasp your wrist as a sign of a respect, and that pointing was rude, but I was paranoid that I was doing something deeply gauche and was completely unaware of it.)

“There is no word,” he explained. “Not in Setswana. We say water bird, but then we use the English, kingfisher.”

“Oh,” I said again. “There isn’t a word. Okay.”

He frowned down at the paper. “Ah…there is a book. In eighteen-hundred, a man went all around Botswana and collected all the Setswana words. If you look in that book, there may be a word. But we do not know the word now. It is…” He trailed off, waving the tip of the pen in that I-am-trying-to-think-of-a-word motion (which may not be completely universal, but seems to hold up pretty well between Botswana and here.)

“Lost?” I suggested after a minute.

“Lost. Yes. There was a word, I think. It is lost.” He handed me back the paper.

Realistically, I suspect that there is no chance that there wasn’t originally a word for kingfishers–they have six or seven species, and at least a couple are common, loud, and found on every waterway. But whatever it was, it’s out of common usage. And in fact, of the sixty-odd birds that B-man successfully identified for me, every one was named in colloquial English, except maybe the Brubru. A few, like the coucals, might have started as a native word, but had then had English tacked on–Copper Tailed Coucal, White-Browed Coucal, Burchell’s Coucal. (Burchell, whoever he was, got around. Half the birds were named after him.)

I felt a pang of guilt, as if my native language was a dog that had bitten his. English sheds words constantly, of course, but usually not to replace them with someone else’s. And Setswana is a language with many, many native speakers–Wikipedia says over five million–and on no one’s list of endangered languages. Many of the parks were named in Setswana, and he’d told us both the common Setswana names of animals and sometimes the word in the regional dialect. But here I’d stumbled onto a word that had simply slipped away and been replaced by English.

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“No, no, it’s okay,” I said. “I’m sorry it’s lost. Languages are strange.”

He nodded, then shrugged. Sometimes the bumper falls off your truck. Sometimes a word falls off your language.

I still don’t entirely know how I feel about that.