4^6 
BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA 
class superadded. Thus : not Mundw rakulungwa, but M ?/ndu juaS-m-kulungwa 
man great man this of this greatness 
= Man of greatness, “ great man.” 
Ci-yao from its many difficulties will never become a useful language in 
British Central Africa. The Yao themselves seem to feel this from the 
assiduity with which they employ Ki-swahili and Ci-nyanja in their trade 
transactions. From a philological point of view, however, it is a most 
interesting language, the construction of which throws considerable light on 
the genesis of the Bantu speech. 
Among the languages spoken in British Central Africa should be enumerated 
Zulu. The use of Zulu still lingers among the older men and the “aristocracy” 
of the Angoni kingdoms in South-West, North-West, and Eastern Nyasaland, 
though it is rapidly disappearing. In some districts it is spoken without the 
clicks : in others the seventh prefix has been changed back to Ici- from Isl¬ 
and the eighth prefix has been restored to Ivi- from the Zulu corruption Izi-. 
This no doubt is borrowed from the Wa-tonga, Wa-chewa, and Ba-tumbuka, 
who are the indigenous inhabitants and subject peoples of Angoniland. Just 
possibly it may be that the ancestors of the Angoni who left Zululand about 
1820 retained the older forms of these prefixes. Zulu will probably leave traces 
of its intrusion into these lands by grafting on to the speech of the Nyasa 
peoples many words of South African origin, but as a spoken language it is 
destined to a speedy disappearance north of the Zambezi. 
Although the various Bantu dialects of British Central Africa have reached 
this country by many different routes and are derived from many different 
subsidiary stocks—their common origin in some cases going back to a distance 
of time and space both remote—they are already reacting on one another in a 
manner to produce a certain surface resemblance often deceiving to the casual 
traveller who requires to examine closely into their structure and vocabularies 
to realise that although outwardly alike in some respects, there are in reality 
well-marked differences between the minor groups; and still more between 
the languages to the west of Lake Nyasa and those to the east of that Lake 
(Ci-yao and I-makua). 
The vocabularies which now follow have all with four exceptions been 
collected by myself from natives who spoke one or other of the languages 
as their mother-tongue. The four exceptions are Ci-mahanja, Ci-mbo, 
Ci-cuambo, and Ci-mazaro, which were kindly collected for me by the Rev. 
D. C. Ruffele-Scott of Blantyre. Some of the w r ords in the Ci-cipeta 
vocabulary are supplied by Mr. Scott also. 
The system of orthography which I have deemed it wise to adopt 1 is 
practically that of Lepsius, with slight modifications which make it easier 
for printing purposes. The consonants are pronounced as in English with 
the exception of c, which always stands for ch in “church.” N represents 
the ringing nasal sound in the word “ ri ng'mg” (as contrasted with “ng” in 
stronger’') \ thus Mananja is pronounced Mang’anja but without any pause, 
cl stands for dh (th in “this”), f> stands for th (tJi in think); s is the equivalent 
of sh; z the equivalent of zh; y (Greek gamma) represents the guttural 
sound of gh (Arabic ^ yain —-like the German pronunciation of r) ; y (Greek 
1 Although it will not at first seem apparent to the reader, jua and in- are really of the same origin. 
They both go back to the oldest form of the first prefix— ngu-. This became in time hit- and mu- as a 
premc, but as a particle it has in many languages an older type— gu-, ju-, yu-, wit-, w’-. The in- in 
w’kulungwa stands, of course, for nnt-. 
