Guinea
2024The story of a word is the story of a world:
The borrowing of words reflects interactions between cultures. The Egyptian currency, "Genēh," derives from the word "Guinea", the name of an old British coin. This, in turn, was taken from the name of the area of West Africa that the gold came from to make them. This word's journey reflects the forces of race, commerce, and colonization that shape the modern world. It reveals complex power dynamics at play in the process of linguistic and cultural borrowing, which can be about dominance and control, as well as exchange.