stronger and better than that of the African Native, or, in other words,
those who believe that the white race has inherent mental superiority
must prove innate inferiority in the mental make-up of the Native.

There is a more or less indefinite notion abroad that the Bantu
languages, as compared with those of Europe, are but poor and
ineffective vehicles for the conveyance of abstract ideas, wherefore the
capacity to form and entertain such ideas may be taken to be innately
inferior in the Native brain. That the language of a people embodies, so
to speak, in objective form the intellectual progress made by it is
certainly true, and it will be well, therefore, to state briefly the
actual and potential value of the Native speech as compared with that of
the whites.

The living and the dead languages of the world have been classified by
philologists into three main types of linguistic morphology; the
isolating, like Chinese; the agglutinative, like Turkish and Bantu, and
the inflective, like Latin. It was customary not long ago to look upon
these three types as steps in a process of historical development, the
isolating representing the most primitive form of speech at which it was
possible to arrive, the agglutinative coming next in order as a type
evolved from the isolating, and the inflective as the latest and
so-called highest type of all. But since the matter has been carefully
studied it has been admitted that there is no satisfactory evidence for
believing in any evolution of linguistic types. English is now
considered to be an isolating language in the making while Chinese is
cited by authoritative European scholars as being a language which with
the simplest possible means at its disposal can express the most
technical or philosophical ideas with absolute freedom from ambiguity
and with admirable conciseness and direction.[16]