Page:George McCall Theal, Ethnography and condition of South Africa before A.D. 1505 (2nd ed, 1919).djvu/117

Rh musin to see oneself, causative mukei to cause to see, reciprocal muku to see one another, diminutive muro to see a little, negative mudama not to see; passive voice muké to be seen. It had all our moods and tenses. It was not inflected to express number or person, which were indicated by the noun or pronoun with which it was connected, just as in our common Cape Dutch.

Now here is a sex-denoting language of the same class as the languages of Europe and North Africa, and yet full of those primitive sounds called clicks. It forms a strong contrast to the speech of the Bantu in the same continent, though that is of a high order too. How can it have arisen? There is only one way in which this can be satisfactorily explained, and that is by men of a light-coloured North African race consorting with women of Bushman blood. There is reason to believe that the men were more numerous than the women, as will be pointed out elsewhere, and therefore the form of their language was retained, while many Bushman words and the four Bushman clicks least difficult to pronounce were incorporated in it. In exactly the same manner, when the Amaxosa took modern Hottentot women to live with them, many Hottentot words and three of the Hottentot clicks were adopted, but the structure of the Xosa language underwent no change whatever. The new words were simply made to fall in grammatical line with those previously in use.

There were almost as many dialects as there were tribes, but these varied less than the forms of English spoken in different counties before the general diffusion of education from books. Towards the close of the seventeenth century an interpreter belonging to a tribe in the neighbourhood of the Cape peninsula, when accompanying Dutch trading parties, conversed without difficulty with even the most distant from his own home. This is a proof that the occupation of the country by these people and their spreading out along the coast must have been very recent. Unwritten languages change rapidly, especially in the vowel sounds, and tribes having no communication with each other, as for instance the Namaqua and the Gonaqua, in the course of only eight or ten generations would have developed differences greater than were found to exist. Another proof of their recent