ABSTRACT
The language of the Zoombo is very close to the San Salvador dialect, recorded in particular by W. Holman Bentley in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and described principally in his Dictionary and Grammar of the Kungo Language. Bantuists will readily recognize the various processes of affixation and class assignment as typical of Bantu languages as a whole; the peculiarity of Zoombo, and the Kongo group as a whole, lies in the extreme regularity and productivity of the system. Perhaps more interesting to linguists at least are the sets of terms relating to moral concepts which are formed from the regular derivational processes of the language. It will be argued that the customary definitions of 'abstract' are not precise enough for their description, and some such technique as that proposed under the name of 'componential analysis' is needed to deal adequately with the various parameters involved.
