416 



THE " DESCRIPTIVE COMPLEMENT " IN THE SIRONGA 

 LANGUAGE COMPARED WITH THAT IN SESOTHO AND 



IN ZULU. 



BY 



Rkv. H. L. Bishop. 



Read July 13, 1922. 



I . — General Statemi:.\t 



V 



The SiRonga language is that of tlie natives of the southern 

 extremity of the Province of Mozambique, who are called 

 BaRonga by . themselves, and Landim by the Portuguese. It 

 exhibits the usual characteristics of the Bantu family of languages, 

 to which it belongs. Not the least interesting of its grammatical 

 features is the class of words for which I now propose the name 

 Descriptive Complement." 



These words present us with a most curious grammatical 

 problem, that of determining then- true nature, and of classifying 

 them as parts of speech. Bearing in mind the difference in 

 standpoint taken by European and African minds which is shown 

 by other phenomena of Bantu speech, it will be well to try, \n 

 the following discussion, to divest ourselves, as far as possible, of 

 European grammatical prepossessions, and to leave until the end 

 of our study any consideration of the many names which have been 

 proposed and used t-o describe this class of words by various 

 writers on the Bantu languages. My use of the term " Descrip- 

 tive Complement " is not in the least intended to beg the 

 question. 



The presence of these, or similar words, has been noted in 

 several Bantu languages, and careful study will-, quite possibly, 

 show them to exist in all the languages of that group. It is inter- 

 esting to note that they are recorded also in Ewe, a language of 

 the Sudanian family. 



They express, as a rule, at any rate, sudden impressions, and 

 may, it seems, be coined almost at will. The Rev. H. A. Junod, 

 in his " Life of a South African Tribe,' vol. 2, p. 147, gives an 

 instance of such coinage which came under his own observation. 

 Such coinages, one woidd imagine, would have, in the majority of 

 cases, a short and precarious existence: but the descriptive com- 

 plements in common use and widely known in SiRonga form 

 quite a large class of words, a class probably far larger than 'we 

 are at present able to judge from our very incomplete lists. The 

 n)eaning, at any rate, in the ease of new coinages, is greatly 

 iielped by the use of gesture and intonation. This is, I think, 

 true of them all. 



