Heads of Mpongwe Grammar: Containing Most of the Principles Needed by a Learner (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

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Excerpt from Heads of Mpongwe Grammar: Containing Most of the Principles Needed by a Learner

The Mpongwe, or Ayogo (wise ones, as they modestly call themselves), live on both Sides of the Gabun River, about a half degree north latitude, extending fifty or sixty miles inte rior. The Orungu, about sixty miles south, and the N kami people from eighty to one hundred miles beyond, speak the same language, with a few differing words, and a slight dif ference of pronunciation.

In the present limited extent to which these languages, or dialects, are known and written, it would be useless to attempt to trace their relations and analogies; and we, of the present day, can only contribute our mite for the use of the ones who shall follow us in the coming century. And they will revel in the beauties of a language or dialects as elaborate in structure and as musical in tone as any of the old unspoken (not dead) languages that are the delight of the scholars of the present day. And it is only forty years since any of these di alects (with, perhaps, one or two exceptions) had a sentence written, or even an alphabet.

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