Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 4.djvu/151

 telligible jargon. In the current language of the colony, this appellation has been further reduced to the final syllable, "Tots." They have themselves no general name for the whole race; but the term Khoïn ("Men"), which occurs in several of the tribal denominations, has been extended to all of them collectively, and the Hottentots now commonly call themselves, or are called by scientific writers, Khoï-khoïn, that is, "Men of men," or "men" in a preeminent sense.

Although much taller than the southern Bushmen, and differing from them in their relatively higher degree of social culture, the Hottentots still resemble them in many respects. They have the same dirty yellowish complexion and the same elongated shape of the head, while the women show the same, or rather a

more decided, tendency towards steatopygia, or the accumulation of fat in the lower parts of the body. Till recently they used the same bows and the same poisoned arrows in the chase and tribal warfare. They have even the same musical instruments, delight in smearing the body with the same colours and decorating it with the same ornaments. Lastly, the language still current amongst those who have not already laid it aside for English or Dutch is undoubtedly derived from the same stock as that of the Bushmen. It is, however, much richer, more pliant, and less encumbered with harsh sounds and uncouth forms of expression. It possesses three fully inflected numbers and grammatical genders, and by agglutinating its monosyllabic roots is even able to express abstract conceptions, as well as many delicate shades of sentiment and thought. In the Bantu tongues words are strung together in the sentence chiefly by means of prefixed pronominal elements, whereas in Hottentot the same formative particles are invariably attached to the end of the roots, so that this is essentially a "suffixed-pronominal" language. It is divided into a considerable number of dialects, which are all