PYGMIES AND FOREST NEGROES 



53S 



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 : ■ 





Ka 111 k^ ke 



Their pronunciation is singularly staccato, every syllable being distinctly 

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

 Ihe vowel sounds are broad and simple— a, e, i, a, 6, \i, and ii (pronounced in 

 vulgar English spelling ah, ay, ee, oh, 

 aw, 00 : ii is the French u). The 

 Dwarfs are singularl}' quick at picking 

 up languages. Those that stayed witli 

 me at Entebbe in 1900 arrived in January 

 unable to speak 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 witli one another. 

 A little Dwarf woman who had resided 

 for some six years at Kampala amongst 

 the Swahili porters spoke jDerfect 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 Euwen- 

 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 

 Mafibettu; Stanley's, Wissmann's, Wolf's, Francois'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 UWAKF WOMAN FUOM THE BABIRA 

 COUNTRY 



