452 



KISAWAHILL 



mate, as Wasawahili for Wasawahili. 1 Hence 

 when first writing proper nouns I preferred 

 Mtony and Pangany to Mto-ni and Panga- 

 ni. Similarly the W when placed between a 

 consonant and a vowel is often so slurred over 

 as hardly to be detected. Por instance, Bwana, 

 master, becomes B'ana, and TJnyamwezi might 

 be both written TJnyam'ezi were it not liable 

 to confuse the reader. There is also a Spanish 

 n (Nina), as in Nika, the bush, and Nendo, 

 the P. N. of a district, which I express by 

 Ny, e. g, Nyika and Nyendo. Pinally, being a 

 lazy language, which well suits the depressing 

 climate, it takes as little trouble to articulate 

 as Italian : hence, even in the first generation, 

 Arabs and Baloch exchange for it their own 

 guttural and laborious tongues, and their offspring 

 will learn nothing else. This is more curious 

 than the children of the Scandinavians aban- 

 doning the father-tongue for Norman and Anglo- 



1 Nothing can be more erroneous than the following 

 sentence : ' But the Mohammedan natives of the Eastern 

 Coasts of Africa, who are comprehended under the name 

 of Sawahili, do not pronounce the hard h of the Arabs ; 

 the vowels, therefore, between which it stands in their name, 

 unite to forma diphthong, like the Italian at or the English i 

 in wile ; and Sawahili is pronounced Sawili ' (Inner Africa 

 Laid Open, p. 88). The Wasawahil merely change the hard 

 Arabic h (^-) into the softer guttural (*). 



