Page:George McCall Theal, Ethnography and condition of South Africa before A.D. 1505 (2nd ed, 1919).djvu/65

Rh A remarkable circumstance in connection with the Bushman language is its possession of a verb of such wonderful power, conjugated by means of particles, that any action that can be expressed in English can be expressed with equal precision in it. In the infancy of the language it is evident that the verb became more highly developed than the other parts of speech, as it may have been more necessary to meet the wants of the people. Stand, run, eat, stood, ran, ate, shall stand, could run, have eaten, for instance, might be more useful words for a savage to know than the names or qualities of the objects around him.

The roots of many Bushman words are apparently polysyllabic, thus marking a great difference from Hottentot, all of whose roots are monosyllabic. But it is possible that upon very close analysis some of those polysyllables might prove to be really composites.

In counting, besides the method of showing the fingers described by Dr. Bleek, some Bushmen used the expression two two for four, two two one for five, two two two for six, and so on up to ten, beyond which none of them could proceed. The dialects differed from each other as widely as German from English, if not much more so, and it is possible that in some of those now extinct the means for expressing numbers may have been more perfect than in those that are known, in none of which has any word for a numeral higher than three been discovered. They could, however, easily make their friends acquainted with the exact number say of five elands over a ridge by describing them as two lying down, one looking towards the water, and two looking towards a particular hill.

The principal cause of the Bushmen who still survive having lost the use of their ancestral tongue was the extreme facility with which they learned other languages. In this respect their minds were like those of little children, who acquire a foreign tongue, when brought into contact with those who speak it, far more readily than their parents do. A young Bushman on a farm in the interior of the Cape Colony