Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/367

IX.] the South-African noun has hardly any; the case-relations are indicated by prefixed prepositions. Nor is there a personal inflection of the verbs, except by means of prefixed pronouns. Mode and tense are signified chiefly by auxiliary words, also standing before the main root; but in part by derivative forms of the root, made by suffixes: thus, tandile, 'loved,' from tanda, 'love;' and like suffixes form derivative conjugations of the root, in number and in variety comparable with those which, as was shown in the last lecture , come from the Turkish verb: examples are bonisa, 'show,' bonela, 'see for,' bonana, 'see each other,' bonisana, 'show each other,' bonwa, 'be seen,' etc., etc., from bona, 'see.' Except in the interjectional forms, the vocative and second person imperative, every verb and noun in these languages appears in connected speech clothed with a pronominal prefix; so that a prefix seems as essential a part of one of their words as does a suffix of an Indo-European word, in the older dialects of the family.

A very peculiar feature of the phonetic structure of some of the best-known South-African languages, especially of the Kafir branch (including the Zulu), is the use, as consonants, of the sounds called clicks, made by separating the tongue sharply from the roof of the mouth, with accompanying suction—sounds which we employ only in talking to horses or in amusing babies. As many as four of these clicks form in some dialects a regular part of the consonantal system, each being subject to variation by utterance simultaneously with other sounds, guttural or nasal. It is not a little remarkable that the clicks also abound in the tongues of that isolated branch of the Hamitic family, the Hottentot and Bushman, which is shut in among the South-African dialects: indeed, they are conjectured to be of Hottentot origin, and caught by the other tribes by imitation, since they are found only in those members of the different South-African branches which are neighbours of the Hottentots.

Upon the western coast of the continent, the languages of the family of which we are treating extend as far as into the territory of Sierra Leone; but they are much intermingled at the north with other tongues of a different kindred. A