442 



THE KISAWAHILI. 



with the Kafir regions, the Congo and the Zain- 

 beze rivers, than with ^Ethiopia or the Nile Valley- 

 proper. Mr Cooley's term fi Zangian ' or c Zin- 

 gian ' also unduly limits the area to that of a 

 mere sub -family. 



The crux grammaticorum of the great South 

 African language is its highly artificial system of 

 principiatives or preformatives. 1 In the three 

 recognized lingual types of the old world the 

 work of inflexion, the business of grammar, and 

 the mechanism of speech disclose themselves at 

 the ends of vocables. In this prefixitive tongue 

 the changes of mood, tense, case, and number, 

 are effected at the beginning of words by preposi- 

 tive modifying particles, which are evidently con- 

 tractions of significant terms, and whose apparatus 

 supplies the total want of inflexion. This de- 

 velopment, arrested in other languages — the 

 Coptic, for instance — here obtains a significance 

 which isolates it from all linguistic society. The 

 practised student at once discovers that he is 

 dealing with a completely new family by the 

 unusual difficulty which unvaried terminations 



of Inner Africa (p. 123), 1 The Nilotic family of languages no- 

 where extends into the basin of the Nile.' 



1 I have sketched the distinguishing points of the Hamitic 

 tongues in my Preface (p. xxii.) to ' Wit and Wisdom from 

 West Africa' (London: Tinsleys, 1865). 



