Languages
What Pulaar does with time
There is no single everyday word for “week” in Pulaar. There are market days, and there is everything between them.
Ask someone in Saré Yoba when a cousin is arriving and you will rarely get a date. You will get "after the market", or "the market after this one".
This is not vagueness. It is a calendar — one that is shared by everyone in a hundred-kilometre radius and that never needs to be written down.
Greeting as a whole conversation
A Pulaar greeting can last a full minute and consists almost entirely of asking about peace: your peace, your household’s peace, your herd’s peace. Only after that does anyone say what they came to say.
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