92 



ON THE CLASSIFICATION 



phics, in consequence of their innate concrete pictorial 

 character may be able to denote the differences of gender 

 as well as of position ; thus the Old Egyptian hieroglyphics 

 have different symbols for the Ego, in case it is a man, a 

 woman, a king, a god, &c, but all these different hierogly- 

 phics are pronounced alike. 



Under these circumstances one cannot help being at first 

 startled by a statement contained in the Rev. Mr. Schoen's 

 Vocabulary of the Haussa language, in which he says on page 

 13 : " One of the beauties of the Haussa language consists in 

 the power it possesses to distinguish the gender in the Personal 

 Pronouns through the Singular Number ; especially in the 

 Second and Third Persons, and sometimes in the First too, by 

 adding a, the characteristic termination of the Feminine 

 Gender to ni, nia " I. " From the very words of Mr. Schoen's 

 it is evident that this distinction of gender in the first personal 

 pronoun is unusual, but even if this were not the case the 

 subsequent explanation of its formation settles its concrete 

 origin ; moreover the Haussa dialect does not stand alone in 

 such peculiar concrete speech. 143 A similar distinction occurs 

 in Burmese and Pegu by means of the adjective " female" 

 being added. 144 



The Semitic languages introduce gender into their conju- 

 gational system, as the personal pronouns or rather their 

 representatives are inseparably united with the verbal base. 

 The Aryan languages do not include gender in the different 

 persons of their tenses. 



(143) The Haussa belongs to the group of those Central African languages 

 whose philological position has not been definitely settled. From the limited 

 information I have obtained about it, I feel inclined to regard it as an 

 original concrete language which, in consequence of the influence of Semitic 

 pressure underwent a change in its grammatical constitution, and developed 

 itself to a modern abstract language with the distinctions of gender. Besides 

 in the first personal pronoun (ina or ni m., nia and ta f., ta being like the 

 third person) gender is also expressed in the second and third persons, for 

 ka is " thou" masc, hi " thou" fern, shi, ya, sa is " he," ta, ita and tai she. 

 If modern Haussa is what I take it to be, it stands to the Semitic language 

 in the same connection as modern Bengali stands to Sanskrit. 



(144) E.g., hywon ma, I fern, (inferior). 



