The Noun-Classes

We have already referred to Giacinto Brusciotto as the author of the first attempt at a Bantu Grammar. He was an Italian Capuchin, Prefect of the Apostolic Mission to the Kingdom of Congo, about the middle of the seventeenth century. Judging from his book (published at Rome 1659), his linguistic aptitudes were of no mean order, and no doubt he had profited by many years‘residence in the country. It is remarkable, at least, that he succeeded in grasping the principle of the noun-classes, which eluded more than one of his successors. We have seen that Lichtenstein missed it ; and—even more unaccountably—Burton, writing about i§6o, with the work of Krapf and Rebmann before him, could speak of ‘the artful and intricated system of irregular plurals’ in 32Swahili. ¹ In Cavazzi’s History of the Kingdom of Congo, ² first published in 1671, it is stated that a missionary, after six years spent in trying to learn the rules of the language, only found out that there were none ! It is strange that this book takes no notice whatever of Brusciotto or his grammar.