ABSTRACT

First published in 1919, this volume provides a detailed linguistic breakdown of the Bantu language family of Central and Southern Africa. Its author held in-situ expertise in Nanja, Swahili, Zulu, Giryama and Pokomo. A professor of Swahili and Bantu languages, she was the author of several books on Bantu languages and African peoples. The volume aims to depict the broad principles underlying the structure of the Bantu language family and attempts a classification of those languages. Contemporaneous with the colonization of Tanzania, many of the areas to which this volume was relevant were under British control at the time of publication.

chapter 1|19 pages

Introductory

chapter 2|11 pages

The Alliterative Concord

chapter 3|23 pages

The Noun-Classes

chapter 4|16 pages

The Noun-Classes (continued)

chapter 5|16 pages

Cases : The Locative

chapter 6|23 pages

The Pronoun

chapter 7|9 pages

The Copula and the Verb ‘To Be’

chapter 8|15 pages

The Adjective

chapter 9|10 pages

The Numerals

chapter 10|13 pages

The Verb

chapter 11|26 pages

The Verb (continued)

chapter 12|17 pages

Adverbs and Particles

chapter 13|19 pages

Word Building

chapter 14|14 pages

Some Phonetic Laws