" DESCRIPTIVE COMPLEMENT " IM SIRONGA.' 425 



way: A ku ti mpsi. He binds himself. He goes on: " Some are 

 at the same time transitive and intransitive, according to the 

 sense. "Ex. A ku kivc-kive, he drags his leg. (Gait). A ku yi kwe, 

 he drags it (the pole). 1 have not yet found these uses, as far as I 

 have observed. The fact, shown I think above, that many of 

 these uords give birth to regular verbs, is, as he says, highly inter- 

 esting. 



■ Those used with ho ctsa and- ho cma in ScSotho seem to be 

 odvfrbs Note also these phrases (Dieterlen Diet.), e.g., ngoo. 

 Liliba li omiJc ngoo. The fountains are quite dry. Ngoo, be quite 

 dry. T(i : ha bolaiJc la. Ho has killed them all. Ta, to finish. 

 Qeclic, to be extinguished suddenly. QccJic a shea. He is already 

 dead. Too. Ho re too. There is nothing. Kc le mong too. I am 

 quite alone. Tseklie (to break, of day). Bosiu bo sa tsckhc. The 

 night finishes completely. It is daylight. 



Now it seems to me to be ditticult to follow Mr. Junod in 

 calling tlu'se words adverbs, if they can have so much of the 

 nature of verbs as to take a direct object. Perhaps, too, the deriv- 



. ation of verbs from adverbs is difficult. For these reasons I think 

 that the term adverb nuist be rejected; but I think that the 

 word ■' descriptive " should certainly be kept, as part of any 



; name that may be agree'd upon for these words. 



: ** Colenso. again, called them (op. cit. p. 128) " particles used 

 adverbially," and Miss Werner, writing of those in Ewe (Lang, Fam. 



'Af.,p.47) says, "they are functionally adverbs, since they qualify 

 the action signified by a verb, but some ma^^ be classed as adjec- 

 tives." Cp. adjectival use of pshuJiiJti. in SiRonga." They are 

 not by any means all particles, and while they certainly may be 

 said to be used adverbially, the difficulty is to find a name, and 

 not a description, which will express this. Grout and Endemann 

 call them interjections. I agree with Mr. Junod that some of 

 them may be such. Cp. tie, quoted above, in SeSotho. They 

 are by no means all interjections. 



The same objection lies against Miss Werner's proposal to 

 call them " intcrjertional roo/.s." In any case, are they all roots? 

 The late Snr. Torre do Valle. in the work quoted above, calls 

 them verbs. He is alone in So doing. 



They have also been called, I think by Colenso (op. cit "> 

 ''' fragments of verbs." The Zulu examples given above show his 

 data for this opinion. I do not thinlc that a wider survey of the 

 lists, even in Zulu, would have confirmed this. 



On a review of the whole question, 1 propose the adoption of 

 a term suggested to me by Miss E. W. Bishop .that of " descrip- 

 tive r.omplcryicyits." They are descriptive — highly so — and it may 

 be said of them all that they arc complements grammatically. =■ A 

 wide term is necessary, to include them all. If the word " com- 

 plement " is held to be used in an unusual sense, I would point 

 out that it covers more than one part of speech, and further, 

 that we s^em to have h'ere a part of 'speech foreign to our 

 European ideas and terms, and .that no English term can be ner- 

 fectly satisfactory, if used in .its rigid European grammatical 

 sense. 



