APPENDIX 



In the following lessons, which any man with average in- 

 telligence will be able to learn in much less time than it requires 

 to go from New York to Mombasa, enough of this mostly used 

 pidgin-Swahili will be taught to enable the sportsman to com- 

 municate directly with his guides, gun-bearers, and porters, even 

 if these do not understand a word of English. To anyone who 

 has the time, patience, and ambition to learn the language more 

 correctly — which ought not to take an average man more than 

 five or six months, giving to it about two hours a day — I most 

 strongly recommend the two following publications : " Swahili 

 Exercises " by Edward Steere, a most excellent and concise in- 

 troduction to the Ki-Swahili language, and, to those who un- 

 derstand German, I would recommend as a still better grammar, 

 " Praktische Suaheli Grammatik," by Prof. Dr. C. Velten. This 

 latter book has the advantage of having a splendid dictionary at 

 the end and is, perhaps, somewhat more thorough than the 

 smaller English publication. 



Introduction 



The pronunciation of the Swahili words is very much like 

 that of Italian or Spanish. So, for instance, a is pronounced like 

 a in father; e like e in fret; i as i in pin; o as o in for; w as w in 

 lujig; 3; as y in yet. 



The consonants are pronounced almost exactly as in English. 



To compare the correct Ki-Swahili with the pidgin dialect, 

 let us, for instance, mention the word for my, which, in its sim- 

 plest form is -angu, preceded by the consonant prefix, peculiar 

 to the word of the "owned" object. For instance my wife is 

 hihi wangu; but my knife, kisu changu; my sail, tanga langu; 

 my house, nyumba yangu; my place, pahali pangu. This shows 

 that the same English word, my, may be expressed by either 

 wangu, changu, langu, yangu, or pangu, according to the word 

 to which it belongs. The illiterate porter, however will gener- 

 ally use the form wangu or yangu with all these words with the 



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