218 UGANDA AND THE EGYPTIAN SOUDAN.

trade language of Zanzibar and Eastern Central Africa, and is spoken a little in Uganda.

The chief characteristic of this class of languages is that all the changes (with scarcely an exception) required to form the grammatical inflexions take place at the beginning of the words. Consequently the learner is at first greatly puzzled by what seems the extreme uncertainty of the words. And especially is this the case with the adjectives and possessive pronouns. For in Luganda and the cognate languages, the forms of these parts of speech are regulated by the class of nouns to which the adjective or pronoun has reference, and there are in these languages from seven to ten, or perhaps even more, classes of nouns, most of which have a distinctive prefix both for the singular and the plural.

E.g. in Luganda, lungi means good, and muntu mulungi, a good man ; bantu balungi, good men ; mti mulungi, a good tree; miti milungi, good trees; nyumba nungi, a good house or houses; kintu kilungi, a good think ; bintu bilungi, good things ; lusogi lulungi, a good hill ; nsogi nungi, good hills ; toki dungi, a good banana ; matoki malungi, good bananas; wantu walungi, a good place or places, and so on.

Again with the verbs, prefixes are added to prefixes representing person, tense, relative, subject and object, the verb root coming last, so that often what would be the greater part or the whole of a sentence