I IO 
The Minor Tribes 
Njina “ Engena,” which gives a thoroughly un- 
African distinctness to the initial consonant. 
The adjectival form is archaically expressed by 
a second and abstract substantive. This pecu¬ 
liarity is common in the South African family, as 
in Ashanti; but, as Bowdich observes, we also 
find it in Greek, e.g. AIpsa-sis aVaAs/W, “ heresies of 
destruction ” for destructive. Another notable 
characteristic is the Mpongwe’s fondness for the 
passive voice, never using, if possible, the active; 
for instance, instead of saying, “He was born 
thus,” he prefers, “ The birth that was thus borned 
by him.” The dialect changes the final as well as 
the initial syllable, a process unknown to the purest 
types of the South African family. As we advance 
north we find this phenomenon ever increasing; 
for instance in Fernando Po ; but the Mpongwe 
limits the change to verbs. 
Another distinguishing point of these three 
Gaboon tongues, as the Rev. Mr. Mackey ob¬ 
serves, is “ the surprizing flexibility of the verb, 
the almost endless variety of parts regularly de¬ 
rived from a single root. There are, perhaps, no 
other languages in the world that approach them 
in the variety and extent of the inflections of the 
verb, possessing at the same time such rigid regu¬ 
larity of conjugation and precision of the mean¬ 
ing attached to each part.” It is calculated that 
the whole number of tenses or shades of meaning 
