NA TURE 



129 



THURSDAY, OCTOBER 16, 1919. 



THE BANTU LANGUAGES. 



A Comparative Study of the Bantu and Semi- 

 Bantu Languages. Sir Harry H. Johnston. 

 Pp. xi + 8i5. (Oxford: At the Clarendon 

 Press, 1919-) Price 3 guine&s net. 



THE comparatively small number of people in 

 this country who care in the slightest degree 

 about the Bantu languages must long have been 

 aware that this volume was in preparation, and 

 have regretted scarcely less keenly than the author 

 himself the innumerable difficulties which have 

 conspired to keep it from the public. It is to be 

 hoped that the obstacles to the production of the 

 second volume will speedily disappear, as without 

 it a right estimate of the whole work is impos- 

 sible. It is to contain " an analysis and com- 

 parison of the phonology and word-roots, and a 

 comparative examination of the syntax of the 

 Bantu and semi-Bantu languages," and until these 

 are available we shall be compelled to suspend our 

 judgment on many important points. 



Even a cursory survey of the first volume, how- 

 ever, fills one with astonishment (when one re- 

 members the author's multifarious activities in 

 other directions) at the amount of patient labour 

 involved in the compilation and arrangement 

 of the 274 vocabularies and the tabulation of 

 prefixes and concords following each group. The 

 three preliminary chapters likewise represent an 

 amount of research out of all proportion to their 

 length, and should be studied by all who wish to 

 become acquainted with Bantu comparative 

 grammar; while even those who want to acquire 

 only some particular Bantu language will find 

 their horizons enlarged and their grammatical 

 path smoothed. That these pages contain some 

 highly controversial — and controverted — proposi- 

 tions does not lessen their value. Bantu studies 

 advance, as did the scholastic learning (no further 

 parallel is intended) by means of continual disputa- 

 tions. 



Perhaps the most important of such questions 

 concerns the difference between the prefixes and 

 pronouns, which, though in some cases identical, 

 in others diverge so considerably {e.g. m- and yu- 

 or a-, omu- and gu-) as to make the term 

 "alliterative concord" largely a misnomer. Con- 

 nected with this is the phenomenon of the initial 

 vowel, or article, which Sir Harry Johnston pre- 

 fers to call the "preprefix." This, he thinks, has 

 given rise to the pronoun, therein agreeing with 

 Meinhof, but — so far as we can make out — with 

 this difference : Meinhof holds that the prefixes, 

 probably excepting the tenth, consisted of one syl- 

 lable only — mil-, mi-, U-, ma-, etc. To these was 

 prefixed a demonstrative particle of the hypo- 

 thetical form ya, which, through vowel-assimila- 

 tion and modification or dropping of the conso- 

 nant, produced in time such forms as gumu-, 

 kumu-, umti-, gimi-, imi-, gamn-, ama-, etc. (In 

 some cases the consonant, as well as the vowel, 

 NO. 2607, VOL. 104] 



was assimilated, giving such forms as baba-ndu, 

 bibi-ndu, etc.) This "article," or "preprefix," 

 became the pronoun prefixed to the verb. 



Sir Harry Johnston's view seems to differ from 

 the above in assuming that the original prefix con- 

 sisted of two syllables, of which the first after- 

 wards became the subject-pronoun, while the 

 second supplied the object — thus explaining the 

 difference between these in the cases where it 

 exists. But, taking into consideration such a 

 sentence as this, from his Encyclopcedia Britan- 

 nica article, " It is possible that some of these 

 prefixes resulted from the combination of a 

 demonstrative pronoun with a prefix indicating 

 quality or number," it is really difficult to distin- 

 guish his explanation from Meinhof 's. 



We must leave to phonetic experts the dis- 

 cussion of the passages with which their science 

 is more immediately concerned — viz. pp. 36-41 

 and 44; they will probably dissent from some of 

 the author's statements. Even the lay mind is 

 inclined to doubt whether u in "but" is the short 

 sound of a in " father " ; whether the German 

 "ich-Laut" is "almost English sh"; and whether 

 the Polish velar I ( ) can properly be described as 

 dental. By the " indeterminate labial " (p. 39), bi- 

 labial / and its corresponding voiced sounds are 

 probably meant — and these can scarcely be said 

 to result from " indecision on the part of the 

 individual speaker or the tribe as to the utterance 

 of b or TV." Or are we to suppose that the whole 

 Spanish nation halts between two opinions as to 

 the V in huevo and that in viejo ? But Sir Harry 

 Johnston has seemed to us, of late, to exaggerate 

 his revolt against pedantry into a too indiscrimin- 

 ate contempt for recent developments of phonetic 

 science, and to fall back on " individual vagaries " 

 or carelessness of pronunciation, somewhat as 

 Socrates accused Anaxagoras of falling back on 

 the vovs. At the same time, he credits "certain 

 German philologists" with the theory "that we 

 should attribute to the old Bantu some degree 

 of vagueness in consonantal utterance." It is 

 difficult to discover this theory in Meinhof 's simple 

 statement that primitive Bantu probably had three 

 stops, all voiceless (fe, t, p), and three fricatives, 

 all voiced, y, I, v. All analogv makes it probable 

 that y, for instance (which still exists in Sham- 

 bala, where other languages have g, j, ds, 3, or y), 

 should be "the parent of the modern g" and 

 some other sounds, but what vagueness of utter- 

 ance is implied here, more than in any other 

 sound-shifting that could be mentioned? (Mein- 

 hof, by the by, nowhere claims x, or in Sir 

 Harry's notation x, as "the parent of fe," though 

 he gives an example of the reverse relation.) 



The paragraphs on p. 41 dealing with stress 

 and pitch require some notice. Leaving aside 

 the somewhat confused terminology ("accent or 

 pitch of the voice "), we think the statement that 

 the penultimate stress is the " prevailing rule in 

 Bantu " requires some qualification. In Yao and 

 Luganda the accent is on the stem-syllable, not 

 shifting forward when terminations are added 

 (e."'. 'ivangida, not wangi'da). The same seems 



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