III.] THE AFRICAN NEGRO : I. SUDANESE. 41 



speech of the West, and lastly in the Muhammadan countries, 

 where most of the local tongues have nearly everywhere, except 

 in Sudan, disappeared before the Arabic, Persian, and Turkish 

 languages. 



But in Negroland the case is reversed, and here the less 

 cultured Bantu populations all, without any known exception, 

 speak dialects of a single mother-tongue, while the greatest 

 linguistic confusion prevails amongst the semi-civilized as well as 

 the savage peoples of Sudan 1 . 



Although the Bantu language may, as some suppose, have 

 originated in the north and spread southwards to the Congo, 

 Zambesi, and Limpopo basins, it cannot now be even remotely 

 affiliated to any one of the numerous distinct forms of speech 

 current in the Sudanese domain. Hence to allow time for its 

 diffusion over half the continent, the initial movement must be 

 assigned to an extremely remote epoch, and a corresponding 

 period of great duration must be postulated for the profound 

 linguistic disintegration that is everywhere witnessed in the region 

 between the Atlantic and Abyssinia. Here agglutination, both 

 with prefixed and postfixed particles, is the prevailing morphological 

 order; as in the Mandingan, Fulah, Nubian, Dinkan, and Mang- 

 battu groups. But every shade of transition is also presented 

 between true agglutination and inflection of the Hamito-Semitic 

 types, as in Hausa, Kanuri, Kanem, Dasa or Southern and Teda 

 or Northern Tibu 2 . 



Elsewhere, and especially in Upper Guinea, the originally 

 agglutinating tongues have developed on lines analogous to those 

 followed by Tibetan, Burmese, Chinese, and Otomi in other conti- 

 nents, with corresponding results. Thus the Tshi, Ewe, and 

 Yoruba, surviving members of a now extinct stock language, 

 formerly diffused over the whole region between Cape Palmas and 

 the Niger Delta, have become so burdened with monosyllabic 



1 Eth. p. 272-3. 



2 Even a tendency to polysynthesis occurs, as in Vei, and in Yoruba, where 

 the small-pox god Shakpanna is made up of the three elements shan, to 

 plaster, kpa to kill, and enia a person = one who kills a person by plastering 

 him (with pustules). Cf. also okandilognn with Latin 



twenty = nineteen ; and sa!sz = sa.-lo-si (se lo sa), Purg. v. 135. 



