Page:George McCall Theal, Ethnography and condition of South Africa before A.D. 1505 (2nd ed, 1919).djvu/55

Rh seldom destroy their offspring, except in a fit of passion; but the Bushmen will kill their children without remorse on various occasions, as when they are ill-shaped, when they are in want of food, when the father of a child has forsaken its mother, or when obliged to flee from the farmers or others; in which case they will strangle them, smother them, cast them away in the desert, or bury them alive.

“The Bushmen frequently forsake their aged relations when removing from place to place for the sake of hunting. In this case they leave the old person with a piece of meat, and an ostrich egg-shell full of water: as soon as this little stock is exhausted, the poor deserted creature must perish by hunger, or become the prey of wild beasts. Many of these wild Hottentots live by plunder and murder, and are guilty of the most horrid and atrocious actions.”

Dr. Henry Lichtenstein was the first to attempt to gather a number of words used by them and to place them against words with the same meanings used by Korana Hottentots, thus showing the great difference between the two languages. His information was obtained in 1804 and 1805 from Bushmen living on the great plain south of the Orange river, and he had a competent interpreter and was himself well qualified for the work. But he used no symbols except figures to denote the clicks, and did not distinguish the differences between several of these sounds. No attempt was made by him to ascertain the mode of structure of the sentences, and therefore his list of words is of little or no use to a philologist compared with what the addition of a few phrases would have made it. His general remarks upon the language are:

“Among all the Hottentot dialects, none is so rough and wild, and differs so much from the rest, as that of the Bosjesmans, so that it is scarcely understood by any of the other tribes. It is, in the first place, much poorer in sounds: many sounds, which may be expressed by our letters, in the Gonaqua, the Coran (i.e. the Korana), and the Namaqua languages, are either totally wanting among them, or very rarely occur. Pure vowels are seldom to be heard; but the cluck and the diphthongs are much more frequent. The cluck, in particular, seems the most completely at home among them: scarcely a word occurs without it. The gurgling in the throat