SAWAHIL. 



129 



Argentine Buenos Aires are well known. 'El 

 Sawahil,' the shores, evidently the plural of Sa- 

 hil, is still applied to the 600 miles of maritime 

 region whose geographical limits are the Jub 

 Eiver and Cape Delgado (S. lat. 10° 41' 2", and 

 whose ethnographic boundaries are the Somal 

 and the 6 Kafir ' tribes. Others derive it from 

 El Suhayl, the beautiful Canopus which, sur- 

 rounded by a halo of Arab myth, ever attracts 

 the eye of the southing mariner. The £ Wasawa- 

 hui,' 1 or slave tribes, are fancifully explained by 



1 Foreigners — Arab, Persian, and Indian, — call them Sa- 

 wahili. They call themselves Msawahili in the singular, and 

 Wasawahili in the plural, always accenting the penultimate 

 syllable. In the Zangian tongues a prefixed M is evidently an 

 abbreviation of Mti, a tree, e. g. Nazi, a cocoa-nut, Mnazi, a 

 cocoa-nut tree, or of Mtu, a man. Before a vowel it is eupho- 

 niously exchanged to Mu, e. g. Muarabu, an Arab. The 

 plural form is Wa, a contraction of Watu, men. ' Wa ' also is 

 the sign of the personal, or rather of the rational animate plural 

 opposed to ' Ma,' and must not be confounded with the possess- 

 ive pronoun ' Wa,' of. Mr Cooley (Memoir of the Lake Re- 

 gions, &c, Reviewed, Stanford, 1864), asserts that ' Wa mtu,' 

 1 of a man,' becomes by rejection of the singular prefix, ' Watu,' 

 men (des homines) : ' consequently it is an error to call the 

 coast people Wamrima and the mountaineers Wakilima. 

 If so, it is an error made by every Kisawahili-speaking man. 

 There are, however, tribes, for instance the Rabai and the Do- 

 ruma, that do not prefix the normal ' Wa,' to form a plural. A 

 prefixed 1 Ki,' possibly contracted from ' kitu,' a thing, denotes 

 the language, e. g. Kisawahili : it also acts diminutive, e. g. 

 Kigito, a little mto, or river ; and it appears to have at times an 

 adjectival sense. Opposed to it is ' Ji,' an augmentative form, 



VOL. i. 9 



