74 



Or? THE CLASSIFICATION 



and tried to explain ingeniously its intricacies. The peculiar 

 rules of concord and the genderless character of most of these 

 dialects induced him (who had probably not paid previously 

 much attention to the subject of gender, and who had perhaps 

 never regarded it as an important subject before he became 

 aware of it in Africa) to connect both systems with each other, 

 and to establish a sort of relationship between both. In this 

 effort I believe he failed. Dr. Bleek would have escaped this 

 error of judgment, if he had been more intimate with the 

 general character of gender, as it appears, or rather is hidden, 

 in other genderless languages. The study of Dravidian 

 dialects and some knowledge of other concrete languages 

 attracted my attention in this direction long before I became 

 acquainted with the scientific researches of Dr. Bleek. 

 This eminent scholar starts with the assumption : 

 u As a proven fact, that the system of concord by which one 

 part of a noun was taken to represent the whole, is identical in 

 origin with that of the genders of nouns as found in our 

 languages." 113 



The sixteen different classes of nouns, which we meet in 

 the Otyiherero and other languages of the west coast of South 

 Africa, the thirteen varieties which exist in the Kaffir and 

 Zulu dialects, 114 are a most peculiar phenomenon indeed, but 

 they can never be considered as genders, in the strict meaning 

 of the word gender, whose varieties are confined to three, to 

 male, female, and neuter. They are on the contrary only 

 classes or species of nouns. 



" The distinction of genders, 115 which is of so much importance 

 in the grammars of most languages, has but little influence in 

 the Kaffir language : only four prefixes, out of sixteen by which 



me they do it hear (the) voice of me, i.e., my sheep hear my voice. Here the 

 euphonic letter z in zami, and the pronoun zi, point directly to the initial 

 izim of the noun izimvu ; while the pronoun U, and the euphonic letter I in 

 lami, point to the initial Hi of the noun ilizui." Journ. Americ. Or. Soc.,I. 40L 



(113) Compare Bleek " On the Concord," I.e., page lxxii. 



(114) SeeBleek " On thepositionof theAustralian languages," I.e., page 99, 



(115) Rev. William J. Davis counts in his " Grammar of the Kaffir 

 language," page 8, 16 prefixes. 



