346 HOTTENTOT TLACE-NAMES, 



must of necessity have the same force or meaning? Either this 

 should be made to appear, or the statement should be guarded 

 or modified. Both Kropf and Godfrey refer this particle to 

 " the Hottentot adjectival ending whi( h has been accepted by 

 the Kafirs and affixed to nouns and adjectives." The force of 

 the particle has, lioweA'er, been altered. (8ee Kropf s " Kafir 

 Dictionary," -ra.) 



(c) Early spellers went wrong, not only in clicks and 

 vowels, but also in consonants and gutturals ; examples of this 

 we have in the unhappy jumble of fs and k\s in the various 

 forms which the place-name now given as Trekkenfouic has at 

 various times assumed. Campbell mentions the difficulty in 

 distinguishing between the sounds of the Hottentot h and j). 

 According to Burchell (II., p. 255) a final j) is sometimes 

 silent, or nearly so, and the v sound is used for h in the Kora 

 Hottentot. The name Goupli {lliouh, fat) appears in the forms 

 Coup, Choxip, Kai/h, Kouh, and (roiipli, a final h becoming p 

 and ph , while an initial click becomes in turn C , K and G, to 

 say nothing of not a few other like curiosities. That this 

 puzzling- interchange of letters was not always due to the 

 inability of the writers to appreciate the different sounds, but 

 sometimes to slovenly or indistinct utterances on the part of 

 the natives themselves, appears from Thompson's remarks 

 (" Travels," p. 94 n., 1827): — 



" At the same time it must needs be owned that the articulation 

 of the natives, in many cases, appears so indistinct to a European 

 ear that the strange diversity in the orthography of proper names 

 in the works of different travellers is not at all surprising." 



In the face of these facts to include in a common group 

 place-names ending in " -ra, -ka, -ga, -gha, -qa, -qua, -clia,'' 

 as if these parti( les were not only the result of attempts to 

 produce, in known characters, " one and the same sound," 

 but as if they all had one and the same meaning, appears to be 

 likely to lead to confusion worse confounded; e.g., is it not 

 misleading to place the word Quagga in this " -ra Group of 

 place-names y That is, if the word is what it is p^enerally 

 regarded as being, viz., the onomatopoetic name of Equxis 

 Quaqqa, imitating the peculiar crv of this animal. A writer 

 in the "Scientific African" (p. 72, 190G) says:— ''The 

 Quagga is so named onomatopoetically, being an imitation of 

 the peculiar bark of the animal, sounding like ouog-ga, the 

 last syllable being very much prolonged." x\ccording to 

 Kolben (" Besclireibung des Yorgeburges der Guten Hoif- 

 nung," p. 25, 1745). this word in the form Qu-aiha was 

 applied by the Cape Hottentots to the donkey, being possibly 

 the name of the Quagga applied to an animal that was new, but 

 not unlike it. But there can be little if any doubt that the 

 word is onomatoj)oetic in origin. Then the name Comniadagga 

 is another final syllable of which, -ga, does not appear to give 

 it right of place in this " -ra Group of place-names." It is to 

 be referred to the two Hottentot words, Hionii (a hill, moun- 

 tain), and (la.rah, Cannahis safiva, dagga, or wild hemp, and 

 really means Dagqaherg; Sparrman's initial, Quaminedacha, 

 representing the above click. 



