Liberia ^ 



(Fair-haired) Keltic invaders of Britain finding in possession of 

 the country an Iberian race akin in origin to the Mediterranean 

 peoples. The dark-haired Iberian spouse of the red-haired Kelt 

 would adopt her husband's vocabulary and arrange it to suit her 

 own Iberian ideas ot grammatical construction, and so bring up 

 her children to speak a language ot mixed relationships. 



In West Atrica, as in other parts of the Dark Continent, 

 sometimes the invading race brings a new vocabulary which 

 is woven into an older grammatical system, or, vice versa, it 

 imposes on the conquereei race its own ideas of grammar while 

 accepting the vocabulary ot the conquered. Moreover, these 

 African languages are in such a state of flux that it is quite 

 conceivable some relatively slight revolution might cause a 

 system of prefixes to become a system ot suffixes, and vice 

 vef'Sii} I do not therefore lay much stress on the grammatical 

 differences between the West Atrican languages if I can find 

 any trace ot agreement in root forms and even in phonology. 

 There is, tor example, one distinguishing feature of the Irue 

 Negro speecJi from the west bank of the White Nile west- 

 wards to the Atlantic coast ot Senegambia, an area also in- 

 cluding the northern parts of the Congo Basin and the 

 Cameroons. This region has in phonology the peculiar and 

 distinguishing feature of the guttural-labials, the combinations 

 ot kpzv anci gbwr There is also a great liking for the nasal 

 ;/ (;7). This last feature is shared by the great Bantu group 

 to the south and by the Hottentot-Bushman, but is practically 

 foreign to the Hamitic and Semitic languages on the north and 



' See how the English tongue lias changed in this respect, as regards the 

 place of the qualifying preposition. Our ancestors, following the Teutonic system, 

 spoke of an " up-bringing" ; the modern arrangement is a " bringing-np." Compare 

 "on-set" with "set on," " up-lifted " and "lifted up,'' "off-set "and " set-off,'' etc, 



- These generally appear in European transliteration as gb and kp ; but there 

 is nearly always a zv sound at the end of the combination. 



1094 



