Page:George McCall Theal, Ethnography and condition of South Africa before A.D. 1505 (2nd ed, 1919).djvu/60

36 “To show that the Bushman language, as far as we are acquainted with it, is entirely different from the other tongues of South Africa, we will briefly glance at the structure of them all. The South African languages, with the exception of the Bushman, all belong to one of two families. One of these great families of language is that called the Bantu, which contains Kaffir, Setshuana, etc. The other family—that of sex-denoting languages—is represented in South Africa by one member only, the Hottentot, the dialects of which do not differ essentially from each other.

“The Hottentot and Bantu languages have one very essential feature of their structure in common. In both, as a rule, each noun originally consists of two portions, one of which we will call the stem, and the other the representative element. The latter is a part of the noun which is also used to represent the whole noun, and in this manner either appears as a pronoun, or combines with other parts of speech, which are thereby referred to the noun. For example …

“These examples are sufficient to show the peculiar structure of the Zulu language, in which the nouns are divided into thirteen classes, by being formed with thirteen distinct prefixes, which are also used to represent their respective nouns. The structure of all South African languages, excepting Hottentot and Bushman, is essentially the same as that of Kaffir and Zulu, with regard to the concord and the classification of the nouns. The Hottentot language also possesses the same method of representing a whole noun by one of its parts; but in Hottentot the representative portion is not at the beginning of the noun (as prefix), but at the end (as suffix).

“There are in this manner eight different representative elements in Hottentot, as there are thirteen in Kaffir, and sixteen in some of the languages akin to Kaffir. … We have not been able to discover any trace in Bushman of such a system of representation of the nouns; and we cannot but conclude that it does not exist in this language. This may be explained in two different ways. Either the Bushman language never possessed the faculty of thus representing a noun by one of its parts, or, at least, had not a regular set of representative elements or pronouns, and has not developed a classification of the nouns dependent upon their forms of concord. If so (and there is no certain proof against such an assumption), the Bushman would belong to a very low order of