PYGMIES AND FOREST XEGROES 



533- 



voice on the penultimate syllable, and lowering it again on the last. It 

 is almost a chant, and expressed in musical notation would appear thus : — 



:=f 



Ka hi ke ke 



Their pronunciation is singularly staccato, every syllable being distinctly 

 and separately uttered in a voice which is nearly always low and melodious. 

 The vowel sounds are broad and simple— a, e, i, &>, o, u, and ii (pronounced in 

 vulgar English spelling ah, ay, ee, oh, 

 aw, oo : ii is the French u). The 

 Dwarfs are singularly quick at picking 

 up languages. Those that stayed with 

 me at Entebbe in 1900 arrived in January 

 unable to qieak any tongue but their 

 own Mbuba dialect. When they left 

 Uganda to return to the Congo Forest 

 in May, they could all prattle in 

 Kiswahili and in Luganda, and we were 

 able thus to converse with one another. 

 A little Dwarf woman who had resided 

 for some six years at Kampala amongst 

 the Swahili porters spoke perfect Kiswahili 

 with an absolute grammatical correctness. 

 Have the Pygmies any aboriginal 

 tongue of their own ? No clear sign 

 of it has yet appeared. Travellers who 

 have written down the language spoken 

 by the forest Pygmies between Ruwen- 

 zori and the Cameroons, the Nyam- 

 Nyam country and the Kasai, have only 

 succeeded in showing that the Dwarfs 



spoke the language of their nearest neighbours among the big agricultural 

 Negroes. The language of Schweinfurth's Akka turned out to be only 

 Manbettu; Stanley's, Wissmann's, Wolfs, Erancois's, Kund's Pygmies 

 all talked the Bantu dialect, debased or archaic, of the Bantu Negroes 

 among whom they dwelt. There remained, however, the Pygmies of the 

 Semliki and Upper Ituri forests, along the Nile-Congo water-parting. Dr. 

 Stuhlmann collected a few of their words, and thought for a moment he 

 had hit on the long-looked-for discovery of a Pygmy language, unlike any 

 of the neighbouring forms of speech, until he discovered the dialect the little 

 people were speaking was almost identical with the language of the big; 



289. A DWARF WOMAN FROM THE BABIRA 

 COUNTRY 



