Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 01.djvu/240

AFRICAN LANGUAGES. of the highlands south of it (Kaffa, Kullo, etc.), Galla. and Somali, Haussa in the west of the Sudan.

3. HoTTENTOT-Bu.sHMAN. Possibly this branch represents two different divisions. This is the tlieory of F. Miiller. But the Bushman dialects have not j'et been sufficiently investigated. Lep- sius' attempt to connect Hottentot and Hamitie words is not convincing. None of the dwarf tribes north of 8° south latitude have preserved their original languages.

4. The Bantu Kamily; which embraces, rough- ly speaking, all Africa south of the equator. Its most perfect type is represented by the language of the Zulu Kaffirs and their nearest relatives. To what extent corrupt Bantu dialects are spok- en on the western coast has not yet been deter- mined.

5. The Neuro F.mily; so called because the languages included in it are spoken by the purest representatives of the black race. The idioms of that part of Africa (between the equator and the Sahara) show such a perplexing variety of formation that their classification in a single group must be considered as merely provisional. Perhaps half a dozen different branches could be made of the Negro tongues. It is quite pos- sible that the line of demarkation from the Bantu or half Bantu languages could be shifted further north (see above); but the theory of Lepsius, which considers the whole group as degenerate Bantu languages, can hardly be proved: the degree of affinity would be (en times more remote than, for example, that existing between Semitic and Hamitie. But whether it be regarded as a subdivision of Bantu or as an independent branch, the Negro family clearly forms a distinct group, possessing marked characteristics of its own.

The nature of the following groups is in dis- pute:

6. The Nilotic Branch. It begins with the Nuba, south of Egypt, comprises the isolated remnants of the Barea and Kunama languages at the northern frontier of Abyssinia, and runs west of Abyssinia and of the Galla country down to the Albert Lake, where the Madi and Sliuli form its last representatives. It is quite dis- tinct from the Bantu (beginning in Unyoro). The Masai or Oigob are an isolated advance guard in the southwest. The principal repre- sentatives in the Nile Valley are the Dinka, Sliil- luk, and Bari. The line of demarkation west of the Nile is difficult to trace; with the Bongo and Bagrimma, the Nilotic passes over into the perplexing mass of the fourth group. F. Miiller called the sixth the Nuba-Fulah branch, but the very peculiar Ful language is best treated as a perfectly isolated phenomenon. It seems to have some points of similarity with the Hamitie (on which points Schleicher and Krause have laid exaggerated stress ), and may be one of those odd blendings of different languages, defying all rules of linguistics, of which Africa furnishes various examples (e.g., the Musgu or Muzuk). Its position among the Nilotic languages is far from being certain. Anthropologically, the tribes speaking the languages embraced in this class are for the must jiart jiun' Negroes, though some of them may have an admixture of Hamitie blood.

7. The Equatorial Family. Later (l.SSO), F. Miiller attempted to make of a group of lan- guages, which he had at first classed with the fifth family, a special branch, which he called the Equatorial family. The languages compos- ing this branch are spoken by tribes south of iJarfur; among tliem the Niam-Niam (or A-sande) and Monbuttu (or JIangbattu) are the most important. As was said above, the great fifth group contains a number of families in regard to which it is hard to determine wliether they are independent branches or merely sub- divisions of the general group. Most of the equatorial tribes belong ratlier to a light Negro type.

The Malagasy language. spoken on the island of Madagascar, belongs to the Malay family of speech. By reason of its geographical position it need not be considered here.

Writing. The use of writing and the neces- sity for it imply a degree of civilization to which the majority of the inhabitants of Africa have never risen. It is, therefore, almost exclusively the white race, represented by the Hamites and the Semitic immigrants, which c<ynes into con- sideration here.

Semitic, In the Semitic family we have the Pha-nician alphabet, used by the Carthaginians along the northern coast. The Punic and later Neo-Punic chflracters were modifications of the Phoenician, and are distinguished by special characteristics. The Arabic character is now used wherever Islam has become the prevailing religion: but it is mainly employed for writing the Arabic language, which forms the general medium of religion, commerce, and social inter- course. The use of the Arabic character for African languages is not very frequent (e.g., among the Berbers, the Suahelis). The Malay- an immigrants, however, and the Mohammedan Kafliirs use it as far south as Cape Colony; and the Mohammedans of Shoa as well as the inhabitants — also Mohammedans — of Harrar sometimes write their respective languages, Amharic and the closely related Ilarari, in Arabic letters. On the other hand, in and around Abys- sinia a number of languages are regularly writ- ten in the Amharic modification, or rather amiilification, of the old Ethiopic or Geez alphaliet. Unlike most of the other Semitic languages, Ethiopic and its modern descendants are written from left to right. The vowels are expressed graphically by modifications of or slight additions to the consonants, thus forming a kind of syllabary. We can trace this peculiar system of writing as far back as the fourth century A.D., through some ancient monuments in the old capital of Axum (consult D. H. JlUller, Epiiiraphische Denfcmiiler aits Abessynien, 1S!I4). The development of those peculiarities took phuc on African soil, though the consonantal characters are derived from the old South Arabian writing (wrongly called Himyaritic). See Ethiopic Writing.

. From the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was developed a cursive form, the Hieratic, and this in turn gave rise to the still more cursive Demotic. All these have long since passed out of use. though Coptic, which survives only as the ritual language of the native Egyptian church, retains in its alphabet a few characters derived from flie Demotic.

. The ancient Ethiopians of Napata and Meroe had, beside the Egyptian sysfems of writing, which they used almost exclusively for the Egyptian language, a cursive system of their own for the native idiom. As the few