Life and Language 
for they spoke it more plainly than the older 
people did. In trying to learn their language and 
to teach them ours, we sometimes had quite a 
gay time. In the Yoruba language every word 
terminates with a vowel sound, as, Jamesee in¬ 
stead of James, Jacobu instead of Jacob, Jesu in¬ 
stead of Jesus, and so on. We, in turn, had 
much trouble in putting the accent on the right 
syllable. One morning at breakfast, the children 
were convulsed with laughter by my wife saying 
that there was a horse in her cup of coffee. The 
word for horse and the word for fly is the same, 
excepting that the accent is on the first syllable 
in one case, and on the second, in the other case. 
This made a visiting missionary tell of one 
incident in his experience. Soon after he com¬ 
menced preaching without the aid of an in¬ 
terpreter, a number of the converts came to 
condole with him on account of his feeble 
health. After he had recovered from his sur¬ 
prise, he found out that instead of commencing 
his sermon with the words, “My dear friends,” 
he had been saying every Sunday morning, “1 
am very tired.” The two expressions are the 
same excepting for the accent. 
In reducing the Yoruban language to writing, 
Crowther greatly diminished the size of the 
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