Page:George McCall Theal, Ethnography and condition of South Africa before A.D. 1505 (2nd ed, 1919).djvu/116

92 The nouns were divided into eight classes, three masculine in the singular, dual, and plural numbers, two feminine in the singular and plural numbers, and three common in the singular, dual, and plural numbers. The masculine denoted not only living creatures of the male sex, but whatever was large or prominent. The class was indicated by a suffixed letter, thus masculine khoip a man, feminine khois a woman, common khoi a person of either sex. There were three case forms: nominative, objective, and vocative, thus taras, a woman, was declined as follows:

The genitive or possessive and the dative were not formed by changes at the end of the noun itself, but by words corresponding to our prepositions, which, however, were placed after the noun, as the language did not admit of prefixes even of this kind.

The adjectives were as simple as in modern English, for they were not inflected to signify either gender, number, or case. They had the defect of not being changed in form to express degrees of comparison, and this had to be done in a roundabout way by the addition of other words less expressive than our more, most, less, least.

The system of notation was decimal, and was perfect at least up to a hundred, though it does not follow that every individual could count to high numbers. It was based upon counting by fingers, as is shown by the word for five meaning also the palm or full hand.

The personal pronouns were inflected for number and case, and except the first, I, for gender also.

The verb was as perfect as in any of the languages of Europe. Its root was the second person singular of the imperative mood, and its tenses were formed by means of an auxiliary. It had more forms than the English verb, as is shown by the following example: ordinary mu to see, relative muba to see for, reflective