26. Thethmosis or Amosis, having expelled the Shepherd kings, reigned in Lower Egypt.[645]

FOOTNOTES: 

[645] Rollin, vol. i. pp. 129-147.

* * * * *

CHAPTER VIII.

AFRICAN LANGUAGES.

In the language of the Kafirs, for example, not only the cases but the numbers and genders of nouns are formed entirely by prefixes, analogous to articles.  The prefixes vary according to number, gender and case, while the nouns remain unaltered except by a merely euphonic change of the initial letters.  Thus, in Coptic, from sheri, a son, comes the plural neu-sheri, the sons; from sori, accusation, hau-sori, accusations.  Analogous to this we have in the Kafir ama marking the plural, as amakosah the plural of kosah, amahashe the plural of ihashe, insana the plural of usana.  The Kafir has a great variety of similar prefixes; they are equally numerous in the language of Kongo, in which, as in the Coptic and the Kafir, the genders, numbers, and cases of nouns are almost solely distinguished by similar prefixes.

“The Kafir language is distinguished by one peculiarity which immediately strikes a student whose views of language have been formed upon the examples afforded by the inflected languages of ancient and modern Europe.  With the exception of a change of termination in the ablative case of the noun, and five changes of which the verb is susceptible in its principal tenses, the whole business of declension, conjugation, &c., is carried on by prefixes, and by the changes which take place in the initial letters or syllables of words subjected to grammatical government."[646]

Resources are not yet in existence for instituting a general comparison of the languages of Africa.  Many years will probably elapse before it will be possible to produce such an analysis of these languages, investigated in their grammatical structure, as it is desirable to possess, or even to compare them by extensive collections of well-arranged vocabularies, after the manner of Klaproth’s Asia Polyglotta.  Sufficient data however are extant, and I trust that I have adduced evidence to render it extremely probable that a principle of analogy in structure prevails extensively among the native idioms of Africa.  They are probably allied, not in the manner or degree in which Semitic or Indo-European idioms resemble each other, but by strong analogies in their general principles of structure, which may be compared to those discoverable between the individual members of two other great classes of languages, by no means connected among themselves by what is called family relation.  I allude to the monosyllabic and the polysynthetic languages, the former prevalent in Eastern Asia, the latter throughout the vast regions of the New World.  If we have sufficient evidence for constituting such a class of dialects under the title of African languages, we have likewise reason—­and it is equal in degree—­for associating in this class the language of the ancient Egyptians.[647]