Page:George McCall Theal, Ethnography and condition of South Africa before A.D. 1505 (2nd ed, 1919).djvu/118

94 arrival is their acknowledgment down to the middle of the nineteenth century of the head of the Geiǁkhauas as superior to all the other chiefs in rank, on account of his being the lineal representative of their ruling family when they crossed the Kunene river on their way southward.

No difficulty has been experienced by European missionaries in reducing the Hottentot language to writing, and some religious literature has been printed in it. Words to express abstract ideas unknown before were formed from the roots of verbs and adjectives, and were at once understood by every one, just as meekness and meekly would be understood by any Englishman who had only heard the word meek used before. The reverend Mr. Waudres, Rhenish missionary in Great Namaqualand, was kind enough to write to me how this is done. He says to the root of the verb or the adjective nothing more is necessary than to add the gender suffixes, and the word is at once understood. Thus, to the verb gowa to talk, if the masculine suffix b is added, the word gowab is obtained, which means language. If to the adjective ama, true, the same suffix is added, amab the truth is obtained.

The Hottentot language is now rapidly dying out, as the descendents of the people who once used it have long since learned Dutch, and nearly all have forgotten their ancestral speech. A large admixture of blood—European, Asiatic, and particularly negro—that took place during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, contributed to this result, as well as the state of servitude to which many of these people were reduced. At the present day the language is only in use by some of the Korana clans along the Hart river, and by some of the clans in Great Namaqualand, and even they are year by year employing it less and less.