Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/489

Rh I am sorry Miss Werner should have been irritated by my use of 'x' for the sound tchi,' and also on account of my careful use of 'c' instead of 's.' I purpose to continue the use of 'x' and 'c' so far as Xivili is concerned, but I shall always inform my readers of the fact, as I have done in At the Back of the Black Man's Mind. I maintain that philology has not said the last word on these points, and I claim the privilege of being allowed to dissent in these cases from the all too dogmatic conclusions of the Royal Geographical Society. Sounds convey a certain meaning to me, and the 'c' (as in 'city') in Bavili should in my opinion be preserved until it is finally proved that 'c' and 's' have the same meaning in that language.

Miss Werner says: "Neither is it at all probable that the prefix 'mu' has anything to do with 'mbu,' the sea." In the word 'mwici' (Bentley's 'mwixi'), haze, mist, it certainly has to do with moisture, and 'mu' and 'mbu' are both used for sea in the Congo. Further, if she will believe me, I can assure her that there are a great number of words in the 'mu' class, all relating to moisture and liquids.

From what Miss Werner says, it is evident that 'zila' as a verb in Zululand has come to mean 'to abstain from,' but there is no verb 'zila' in Xivili. Were such the case the negative 'ka' would give the verb an opposite sense, and 'ka zila' would mean 'not to abstain from.'

But anything appears to be possible, and a great deal probable, to the comparative etymologists in their search after roots, and I am sometimes forced to blush for them in their desire to go out of their way to solve what appear to me to be very simple problems. The Bavili have not been disturbed by constant invasions, they have not had change of environment to cause much alteration in their language, and I maintain that the Xivili dialect is nearer to Bleek's ideal of a mother Bantu stock than any other Bantu dialect. The probabilties are therefore that an everyday commonsense reading of their compound words will give my readers a much nearer and truer meaning of the word than any far-fetched foreign derivation.