In the same way, if we successively take as our starting-point ilizwe, ‘country,’ the corresponding plural amazwe, ‘countries,’ isizwe, ‘nation,’ izizwe, ‘nations,’ intombi, ‘girl,’ izintombi, ‘girls,’ we get:
| ilizwe | letu | elichle | liyabonakala, | silitanda | (5) |
| amazwe | etu | amachle | ayabonakala, | siwatanda | (6) |
| isizwe | setu | esichle | siyabonakala, | sisitanda | (7) |
| izizwe | zetu | ezichle | ziyabonakala, | sizitanda | (8) |
| intombi | yetu | enchle | iyabonakala, | siyitanda | (9) |
| izintombi | zetu | ezinchle | ziyabonakala, | sizitanda | (10) |
| (girls) | our | handsome | appear, | we love.[87] |
In other words, every substantive belongs to one of several classes, of which some have a singular and others a plural meaning; each of these classes has its own prefix, by means of which the concord of the parts of a sentence is indicated. (An inhabitant of the country of Uganda is called muganda, pl. baganda or waganda; the language spoken there is luganda.)
It will be noticed that adjectives such as ‘handsome’ or ‘ours’ take different shapes according to the word to which they refer; in the Zulu Lord’s Prayer ‘thy’ is found in the following forms: lako (referring to igama, ‘name,’ for iligama, 5), bako, (ubukumkani, ‘kingdom,’ 14), yako (intando, ‘will,’ 9). So also the genitive case of the same noun has a great many different forms, for the genitive relation is expressed by the reminder of the governing word + the ‘relative particle’ a (which is combined with the following sound); take, for instance, inkosi, ‘chief, king’:
umuntu wenkosi, ‘the king’s man’ (1; we for w + a + i).
abantu benkosi, ‘the king’s men’ (2).
ilizwe lenkosi, ‘the king’s country’ (5).
amazwe enkosi, ‘the king’s countries’ (6).
isizwe senkosi, ‘the king’s nation’ (7).
ukutanda kwenkosi, ‘the king’s love’ (15).
Livingstone says that these apparently redundant repetitions “impart energy and perspicuity to each member of a proposition, and prevent the possibility of a mistake as to the antecedent.” These prefixes are necessary to the Bantu languages; still, Bleek is right as against Livingstone in speaking of the repetitions as cumbersome, just as the endings of Latin multorum virorum antiquorum are cumbersome, however indispensable they may have been to the contemporaries of Cicero.
These African phenomena have been mentioned here chiefly to show to what lengths concord may go in the speech of some primitive peoples. The prevalent opinion is that each of these prefixes (umu, aba, ili, etc.) was originally an independent word, and that thus words like umuntu, ilizwe, were at first compounds like E. steamship, where it would evidently be possible to imagine a reference to this word by means of a repeated ship (our ship, which ship is a great ship, the ship appears, we love the ship); but at any rate the Zulus extend this principle to cases that would be parallel to an imagined repetition of friendship by means of the same ship, or to referring to steamer by means of the ending er (Bleek 107). Bleek and others have tried to find out by an analysis of the words making up the different classes what may have been the original meaning of the class-prefix, but very often the connecting tie is extremely loose, and in many cases it seems that a word might with equal right have belonged to another class than the one to which it actually belongs. The connexion also frequently seems to be a derived rather than an original one, and much in this class-division is just as arbitrary as the reference of Aryan nouns to each of the three genders. In several of the classes the words have a definite numerical value, so that they go together in pairs as corresponding singular and plural nouns; but the existence of a certain number of exceptions shows that these numerical values cannot originally have been associated with the class prefixes, but must be due to an extension by analogy (Bleek 140 ff.). The starting-point may have been substantives standing to each other in the relation of ‘person’ to ‘people,’ ‘soldier’ to ‘army,’ ‘tree’ to ‘forest,’ etc. The prefixes of such words as the latter of each of these pairs will easily acquire a certain sense of plurality, no matter what they may have meant originally, and then they will lend themselves to forming a kind of plural in other nouns, being either put instead of the prefix belonging properly to the noun (amazwe, ‘countries,’ 6; ilizwe, ‘country,’ 5), or placed before it (ma-luto, ‘spoons,’ 6, luto, ‘spoon,’ 11).
In some of the languages “the forms of some of the prefixes have been so strongly contracted as almost to defy identification.” (Bleek 234). All the prefixes probably at first had fuller forms than appear now. Bleek noticed that the ma- prefix never, except in some degraded languages, had a corresponding ma- as particle, but, on the contrary, is followed in the sentence by ga-, ya-, or a-, and mu- (3) generally has a corresponding particle gu-. Now, Sir Harry Johnston (The Uganda Protectorate, 1902, 2. 891) has found that on Mount Eldon and in Kavirondo there are some very archaic forms of Bantu languages, in which gumu- and gama- are the commonly used forms of the mu- and ma- prefixes, as well as baba- and bubu- for ordinary ba-, bu-; he infers that the original forms of mu-, ma- were ngumu-, ngama-. I am not so sure that he is right when he says that these prefixes were originally “words which had a separate meaning of their own, either as directives or demonstrative pronouns, as indications of sex, weakness, littleness or greatness, and so on”—for, as we shall see in a subsequent chapter, such grammatical instruments may have been at first inseparable parts of long words—parts which had no meaning of their own—and have acquired some more or less vague grammatical meaning through being extended gradually to other words with which they had originally nothing to do. The actual irregularity in their distribution certainly seems to point in that direction.
XVIII.—§ 10. Word Order Again.
Mention has already been made here and there of word order and its relation to the great question of simplification of grammatical structure; but it will be well in this place to return to the subject in a more comprehensive way. The theory of word order has long been the Cinderella of linguistic science: how many even of the best and fullest grammars are wholly, or almost wholly, silent about it! And yet it presents a great many problems of high importance and of the greatest interest, not only in those languages in which word order has been extensively utilized for grammatical purposes, such as English and Chinese, but in other languages as well.