PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS — SECTION E. II7 



soundest comparative work known to the English public, not to 

 speak of her own labours in many spheres of research. [To 

 those beginning their study of the subject I can recommend no 

 better book than her " Language Families in Africa," published 

 by the S.P.C.K., and her translation of Meinhof's lectures, pub- 

 lished by Dent.] 



I have omitted the work of Tindall, Shaw, and some Ger- 

 mans, in Hottentot, as lying somewhat beside my main subject, 

 though extremely interesting philologically, and continuing the 

 treatment of one of the earlier South African problems attacked 

 by Peter Kolben and other officials of the Dutch Colony, who 

 took an interest in these neighbour tribes, worthy of more imita- 

 tion by modern administrators. I must not forget in this para- 

 graph to mention the great work done on the aboriginals, ethonolo" 

 gically, by the distinguished Director of the Cape Town Museum. 



VIII. 



For the future, it remains to get an adequate phonetic script 

 used in every language, including, let us hope, our own, even if 

 not adopted for ordinary publication in each : too often their 

 orthography has been inadequately, misleadingly, and contradic- 

 torily settled, even in allied tongues, and it is already too late to 

 expect a reformation ; witness the case of Sesuto and the Sech- 

 wana dialects, where the sounds and forms are almost identical, 

 though, of course, peculiar words occur in each special vocabu- 

 lary. The new literary languages, however, as published, are 

 trenchantly separated into Sesuto, Serolong, and Setlaping, this 

 being largely due to the dialects met with by each group of 

 missionaries, when they reached the publishing stage, being 

 stereotyped as standard, within their various fields. Had the 

 science of phonetics, through more adequate training, then im- 

 possible, reached the missionaries earlier, one consistent ortho- 

 graphy might doubtless have been adopted, followed by 

 translations containing the most expressive words and idioms of 

 every dialect, and giving (like our Authorised Version) a rich, 

 permanent, common standard of vocabulary and diction through- 

 out the whole of Central South Africa. 



In case some of my hearers may be expert in Sechwana 

 dialects, I may explain that I found this statement on experience 

 in a Native Training College, containing representatives of some 

 score of tribes, who were asked to write, each in his own home- 

 speech, the simple sentences: — 



" The chief has made a good law." 

 " He has not yet done it." 



The experiment proved, as was expected, that the rea.1 

 vernaculars, unstandardized artificially by missionary translation, 

 faded into one another, like the colours of the spectrum, and of 

 the twenty versions of these short phrases scarcely two agreed. 



Another desirable move is the introduction of comparative 

 grammars for European students of Bantu, like those of Latin 



