THE AFRICAN PYGMIES. 



669 



of the " clicks " lias often been insisted on ; * another distinguish- 

 ing characteristic is the existence (at least in the Hottentot lan- 

 guage) of grammatical gender— a feature wholly absent from the 

 Bantu tongues. The Bushman language is said to be monosyl- 

 labic. The Hottentots, however, now mostly speak Dutch — or 

 that variety of it to be heard at the Cape — and probably both lan- 

 guages are on the way to extinction. It is said that " a mission- 

 ary, being invited by the Government to send books in the Kora \ 

 dialect to be printed, remarked that his experience was that it 

 was easier to teach the young to read Dutch, and that the old 

 could not learn at all." J 



An examination of the list of Batwa words collected by Dr. 

 "Wolf, as compared with his Baluba and Bakuba vocabularies, 

 and the Congo and Swahili languages, has convinced me that the 

 Batwa, if they have not adopted and modified the speech of their 

 neighbors, have at any rate adopted a great many Bantu words 

 into their own. The numbers up to ten, for instance, are identical 

 (with slight differences of pronunciation) in the Batwa and Baluba 

 languages. But as yet the materials for comparison are too 

 scanty for any definite statement to be made. The few words 

 elicited from the dwarf met by Stanley were, as Mr. Johnston 

 points out, decidedly Bantu ; but we need not conclude from this 

 that the Pygmy race consists merely of outcast and degenerate 

 Bantus. What more likely than that a small and isolated tribe, 

 who, like the Batwa, frequently had friendly intercourse with 

 surrounding and more powerful tribes, should, to a certain extent, 

 adopt the language of the latter ? 



Surveying the Pygmy race as a whole, we find them — shorn of 

 the mythical and magical glamour with which distance and mys- 

 tery had invested them — not so very different, after all, from 

 other human beings, but still sufficiently interesting. There is a 

 shock of disillusion in passing from the elves and trolls of a past 

 age — not to mention Alberic of the Mbelung's Hoard — to the 

 worthy but prosaic Lapps of the present day ; and the " little peo- 

 ple " of whom Bwana Abed entertained such a vivid and unpleas- 

 ant recollection were doubtless minimized in stature by the retro- 

 spective imagination. No well-authenticated adult Mtwa, Akka, 

 or Mbatti seems to be much less than four feet six inches ; while 

 Dr. Petermann thinks that the Pygmies, on the whole, run about 

 a head shorter than the average negro. This may be disappoint- 

 ing to those who are ever on the lookout for the marvelous — by 

 which they mean the abnormal — but the facts as they stand pre- 



* Some of the Kafir languages possess these clicks, but they have undoubtedly been 

 borrowed. 



f Spoken on the Orange River. 



% Modern Languages of Africa. By R. N. Cust. 



