Liberia ^ 



languages. This extremely ancient African speech might have 

 possessed in its syntax a distinction between what was living 

 and what was dead matter, or even between what was human- 

 and what was non-human; but it had nothing like sexual 

 genders. The numerals 2, 3, and 4 were represented by such 

 forms as ha or halt, ta or tato^ and nai. 



The forei^oing sketch must only be taken as a rough 

 plan of the divisions of African speech. We are yet awaiting 

 the philologist who after making a profound study of the 

 representative forms of all these families shall see if he can 

 find a common denominator, or at any rate succeed in tracing 

 back the development of African speech to not more than 

 four or five language births. No doubt the western third 

 of Africa has been longer inhabited in time and far more com- 

 pletely populated by the human race than Africa south of the 

 Equator. But invasion after invasion of emigrants and con- 

 querors has broken up old languages into new jargons, which 

 in time have become stately and intricately-developed forms 

 of speech. The contrast is striking with the southern third of 

 Africa, where, apart from the extremely ancient Bushman speech 

 and the more recent Hottentot compromise,' you have only- 

 one language family to consider, the remarkably homogeneous 

 Bantu. But as regards language, the Negro seems to be \\\ 

 a state of flux. Normally, he can acquire languages totally 

 foreign to his own with far more faciHty than the average 

 European. Many of the Negroes of Liberia are quadri-lingual. 

 They speak some form of English, their own native tongue, and 

 perhaps two other totally distinct Liberian languages. It is 

 quite easy therefore to understand how a new speech can be 



' As before mentioned, the Hottentot language has possibly been formed 

 by an early union between the Nilotic Negroes and the Bushmen aborigines ot 

 Eastern Africa. 



I I 36 



