While I do not pretend to philological authority I do claim the ability
to make a sound comparison between the main Bantu languages which I know
and those European languages with which I happen to be familiar, and I
have no hesitation in saying that though the Bantu types are not at
present as fully developed in point of simplicity and preciseness as are
the main languages of Europe they are, nevertheless, by reason of their
peculiar genius, capable of being rapidly developed into as perfect a
means for the expression of human thought as any of the European types
of speech; they are astonishingly rich in verbs which make it easy to
express motion and action clearly and vividly; the impersonal, or
abstract article "it" is used exactly as in European languages, and the
particular prefix provided in some of the Bantu types for the class of
nouns which represent abstract conceptions makes it possible to increase
the vocabularies in that direction _ad infinitum_. The Bantu types are
not so-called holophrastic forms of primitive speech in which the
compounding of expressions is said to take the place of the conveyance
of ideas, nor are they made up of onomatopoetic, or interjectional
expressions, if indeed such languages exist anywhere outside the heads
of the half-informed. They are languages equal in potential capacity to
any included in the main Indo-European group. Even now in their
comparatively undeveloped state these languages are capable of
expressing the subtleties of early philosophical speculation. I would
not, for instance, feel daunted if I were set the task of translating
into any of these main types, say, the dialectics of Socrates. To do
this I would first reduce the more complex terms to such simple and
common Anglo-Saxon words as when built together would give the same
meaning, and then translate these into their Bantu equivalents. The
substitution of Anglo-Saxon words for those of modern English would, no
doubt, involve a good deal of repetition but the sense would be