Page:George McCall Theal, Ethnography and condition of South Africa before A.D. 1505 (2nd ed, 1919).djvu/58

34 and was therefore familiar with the various symbols used to represent the different sounds, and had the great advantage of having been trained to the work by so able a teacher as her deceased brother-in-law.

In addition to what was in manuscript when Dr. Bleek died, she collected materials upon the mythology, legends, fables, poetry, customs, and superstitions of the Bushmen, in two dialects, and then proceeded to Europe with a view of obtaining competent assistance in preparing the work of her brother-in-law and herself for the press. Some of it she had already translated into English. But unfortunately her health broke down so completely that it was only as a confirmed invalid she was able to write a little, and so the result of the labour of her brother-in-law and herself remained unavailable for the use of others until 1910, when one volume of Bushman text with English translations appeared. This is of great interest, for the language of the Bushmen is already almost entirely lost, and it would not be possible now to collect the material used in it. The few individuals of the race that remain south of the Zambesi and the Kunene have either adopted the language of their neighbours, as those in Central Africa seem to have done, or they have been compelled to use so many foreign words and phrases that the idiom is too corrupt to be of any scientific value as far as the vocabulary goes. A knowledge of the mode of putting words together to express ideas, or the grammatical structure, is of even greater importance than a knowledge of the words themselves used singly, and it would be with great difficulty that this could be obtained now from individuals still living, but it can be acquired with ease from Miss (later Dr.) Lloyd's book.

To show how cautiously Dr. Bleek proceeded in his researches, and how he at length came to realise that he was dealing with the speech of a race either identical with or at the same stage of culture as the palaeolithic negroids in Europe, some extracts from his writings are given here. In 1857 he wrote in the Cape Monthly Magazine: