MOMBASAH PEOPLE. 



77 



the fountain-head. Here the people can hardly 

 articulate an initial ' A : ' they must say, for in- 

 stance Bdula, or as often Mdiila, not Abdullah, 

 and they supply a terminal vowel, as Shkula for 

 School ; the Hindostan man who shirks our 

 double initial consonants would change it to 

 ishkul. The explosive sound of the B by forcibly 

 closing the lips is given to the 31, which be- 

 comes a perfect consonant having sound and 

 continuance : before another consonant it creates 

 in strangers' ears the suspicion of being preceded 

 by the original vowel-sound, and when following 

 a vowel it is articulated as a final not as an initial 

 consonant — M'ana-w^ke (a woman), for example, 

 would be pronounced M'anam-ke. The initial 

 N also becomes before a consonant hard and 

 explosive, and it sounds to the tyro as if a rapidly 

 pronounced ' I ' or ' E ' were prefixed : Europeans, 

 for instance, write A^jia, ' Endia.' At Mombasah 

 I heard the Arab ' Hamzeh,' or compression and 

 contraction of the larynx, when a hiatus of two 

 similar vowels occurs, as in Mcho'o (rain) and 

 Ta'a (a lamp) : in the dialects less pure the gap 

 would be filled up by inserting the liquid or 

 L, as Mfuru for Mfu'u (the name of a tree). The 

 Arabs and the more civilized tribes, I have re- 

 marked, prefer the E to the L, and say Eufu for 



