548 LIFE OF DA VID LIVINGSTONE, LL.D. 



of the language spoken in Ibibio, a country which stretches between the 

 Calabar river and Ibo, on the Niger, and from which, as formerly stated, the 

 Calabar people have come. All the Negro tongues are divided in the gross 

 into two great families, though all are in idiom very much one. Our lan- 

 guage, and all to the north of us, form the one family ; all south of our river 

 form the other. Very much one in idiom, as I have said, they are in this 

 closely allied to the Semitic tongues. Indeed, not only in the idiom of their 

 languages, but in manners and customs, the children of Ham are much more 

 closely allied to those of Shem than we of Japhet are to either. In the for- 

 mation of most other parts of speech from the verb as a root, our language 

 resembles the Hebrew and its allied tongues. The root with us is mostly 

 monosyllabic, and our nouns and adjectives are commonly formed by prefix- 

 ing a vowel. Thus, boh, to feed ; ubok, the hand, the feeder : no, to give ; 

 eno, a gift : bat, to count ; ibat, a reckoning : sanga, to walk ; esang, a staff ; 

 isang, a journey. A participial noun may also be formed from any verb by 

 prefixing eri, as, nam, to do ; erinam, the making or doing ; and by prefixing 

 audi, a performative noun is formed, as, andinam, the maker or doer. In a 

 similar manner adjectives and adverbs are formed from the verb. Very few 

 nouns undergo inflexion to indicate number or gender ; case is indicated, 

 except in the personal pronoun, only by position. In that important part of 

 speech, the verb, the Efik does not form its moods and tenses exactly coinci- 

 dent with those of the English, and it has as a peculiarity a regular negative 

 form. Thus, anam, he does ; inamke, he does not ; edep, he buys ; idepke, he 

 does not buy ; and so throughout. 



"Finding the Calabar people without an alphabet, we of course gave 

 them our own, so far as it was required, /we rejected as redundant; and 

 the sounds represented by /, I, v, x, z, are not found in their language. The 

 omission of I is remarkable, and a serious defect so far as euphony is con- 

 cerned ; yet the language does not sound unpleasantly. The collection of a 

 stock of words was the first thing to be seen to. Mr. Waddell, with character- 

 istic energy, set himself to do so while he and Mr. Edgerley were clearing the 

 bush and getting a house built ; and by the time he left for Jamaica he had 

 a small vocabulary lithographed, which formed our study in our tedious voy- 

 age from thence to Calabar, on reaching which we found Mr. Edgerley had 

 got it printed. This task of word-collecting, simple as it may appear, and 

 especially that of acquiring the native idiom, so different from our own, we 

 found to be of considerable difficulty. No books existing to help us in the 

 work, we were also destitute of the professional teacher, of whose aid our 

 brethren in Eastern missions can avail themselves. Moreover, in seeking 

 amongst the natives the information we wished, never having had their minds 

 turned to such inquiries, even when endeavouring to give what we desired, 

 thev frequently gave erroneous responses ; and possibly, after having their 



