Liberia <^ 



(Fair-haired) Keltic invaders of Britain finding in possession of 

 the country an Iberian race akin in origin to the Mediterranean 

 peoples. The dark-haired Iberian spouse of the red-haired Kelt 

 would adopt her husband's vocabulary and arrange it to suit her 

 own Iberian ideas of grammatical construction, and so bring up 

 her children to speak a language of mixed relationships. 



In West Africa, as in other parts of the Dark Continent, 

 sometimes the invading race brings a new vocabulary which 

 is woven into an older grammatical system, or, vice versa, it 

 imposes on the conquered race its own ideas of grammar while 

 accepting the vocabulary of the conquered. Moreover, these 

 African languages are in such a state of flux that it is quite 

 conceivable some relatively slight revolution might cause a 

 system of prefixes to become a system of suffixes, and vice 

 vsrsa} I do not therefore lay much stress on the grammatical 

 difl^erences between the West African languages if I can find 

 any trace of agreement in root forms and even in phonology. 

 There is, for example, one distinguishing feature of the true 

 Negro speech from the west bank of the W^hite Nile west- 

 wards to the Atlantic coast of Senegambia, an area also in- 

 cluding the northern parts of the Congo Basin and the 

 Camerooiis. This region has in phonology the peculiar and 

 distinguishing feature of the guttural-labials, the combinations 

 of kpw and gbw.' There is also a great liking for the nasal 

 n (»). This last feature is shared by the great Bantu group 

 to the south and by the Hottentot-Bushman, but is practically 

 foreign to the Hamitic and Semitic languages on the north and 



' See how the English tongue has changed in this respect, as regards the 

 place of the qualifying preposition. Our ancestors, following the Teutonic system, 

 spoke of an " up-bringing" ; the modern arrangement is a " bringing-np." Compare 

 "on-set" with "set on," " up-lifted " and "lifted up,' "off-set" and "set-off," etc, 



' These generally appear in European transliteration as gi and I'p ; but there 

 is nearly always a w sound at the end of the combination. 



1094 



