BANTU AND BAVILI PREFIXES 



THE language of the Bavili is a dialect of the one 

 spoken by the people of the Congo, as a section of 

 the great Bantu tongue, and is agglutinative. 



The nouns in this language are always immediately 

 preceded by prefixes, much as nouns in English are 

 followed by the suffixes : ness, dom, tion, ance, ly and 

 ity. All the pronouns, adjectives, and verbs receive 

 the same prefixes as the noun which is the subject of 

 the sentence, so that we need not dilate upon the 

 important part they play in the speech of the Bavili 

 and the Bantu generally. 



Anyone who has looked into the grammars of the 

 different dialects of the Bantu will be struck on the 

 one hand by their similarity, and on the other by the 

 want of order displayed by the different grammarians 

 in their arrangement of the prefixes. 



In 1659 a grammar by Fr. Hyacinth Brusciotto de 

 Vetralla, Prefect of the Catholic Church in the 

 Congo, was published in Rome "for the more easy 

 understanding of the most difficult idiom of the people 

 of the Congo." 



Mr. Bentley gave us his remarkable dictionary 

 and grammar of the Congo dialect in 1887, and 



