BEARING OF BANTU PHILOLOGY ON EARLY 

 BANTU LIFE: 



With I'^lora and Fauxa Names. 



By Rev. Father Norton, S.S.M. 



In Prof. Meinhof s wonderful book on the Lautlehre, as he 

 calls it, on the Bantu dialects, he i^oes some way to reconstruct 

 their original common form, as the speech of our Aryan fore- 

 fathers has been largely reconstructed by the labours of other 

 German scholars. The Professor has had the advantage of 

 starting" with the scientific philology built up by their efforts, 

 and has applied it in a masterly way, beginning" with a thorough 

 investigation and tabulation of the speech sounds of each dia- 

 lect, and so proceeding to a Lautlehre of Ur-Bantu. I trust 

 he will add to much kindness to a stranger forgiveness for this 

 slight study built upon his results. 



In his vocabulary of the original forms of Bantu words, as 

 he deduces them from the present dialects, he gives a number 

 of flora-fauna names. Let us picture to ourselves from them 

 the sort of world the Ur-Bantu lived in, whether about the 

 North bend of the ill-starred Congo, as Sir H. Johnson says, 

 or elsewhere. Of the 14 simple sounds of his original alphabet, 

 none of the vowels (AIU) or semi-vowels (YW) are used to 

 begin any word, nor does the guttural nasal (Ng are in sing), 

 which often does in the dialects {e.g.. Sesutoj. Of the remaining 

 eight, in the words we are considering, T is only used as initial 

 of the root in iliTANGA melon, N only in the words for 

 buffalo and snake and bee (though all the other stem initials 

 are nasalised in the i class, e.g., iNGL' — sheep, stem — GU), the 

 continuous, not momentary, B (Y) is used in the names of the 

 possibly early-domesticated animals — bull, goat, dog. The 

 remaining 20 fauna names begin with K P and the Dutch G. 

 The last begins the words for pig and sheep, as well as those 

 of the big game, panther and the amphibian hippo and croco- 

 dile, with flies and our old friend the locust (already known 

 and loved) at the other end of the scale, llie elephant begins 

 with a mixed letter, not a pure Dutch (i. nor among the 

 original sounds ; hence the wise beast was probably not at first 

 known or named. The smaller game begin with P. antelope, 

 wild cat. rats and mice, and such small deer, with the hyena, 

 and of birds the ostrich only. The rest of the birds begin 

 their cackling names with K. and with this company are num- 

 1)ered the jabbering ape and the tortoise, snail and bushlouse 

 in their shells. In case of animals which utter noises it seems 

 natural to suppose that imitation of these had much scope in 

 name-giving. When Man, in Mesopotamian phrase, " gave 

 names to all cattle and the fowl of the air, and every beast of 

 the field," how should he do so but by listening to and repeat- 



