e which has actually taken place
in the reverse direction in the English language between its former
Teutonic and its modern Romanized conditions; _cf._ "offset" and "set-off,"
"upstanding" and "standing-up").

The legends and traditions of the Bantu peoples themselves invariably point
to a northern origin, and a period, not wholly removed from their racial
remembrance, when they were strangers in their present lands. Seemingly the
Bantu, somewhat early in their migration down the east coast, took to the
sea, and not merely occupied the islands of Pemba and Zanzibar, but
travelled as far afield as the Comoro archipelago and even the west coast
of Madagascar. Their invasion of Madagascar must have been fairly
considerable in numbers, and they doubtless gave rise to the race of black
people known traditionally to the Hovas as the Va-zimba.

The accompanying map will show pretty accurately the distribution of the
Bantu-speaking Negroes at the present day.

[Illustration]

It will be seen by a glance at this map that the areas in which are spoken
Bantu languages of typical structure and archaic form are somewhat widely
spread. Perhaps on the whole the most archaic dialects at the present day
are those of Mount Elgon, Ruwenzori, Unyoro, Uganda, the north coast of
Tanganyika and of the Bemba country to the south-west of Tanganyika; also
those in the vicinity of Lake Bangweulu, and the Nkonde and Kese dialects
of the north and north-east coasts of Lake Nyasa; also (markedly) the
Subiya speech of the western Zambezi. Another language containing a good
many original Bantu roots and typical features is the well-known Oci-herero
of Damaraland (though this S.W. African group also presents marked
peculiarities and some strange divergencies). Kimakonde, on the east coast
of Africa, is a primitive Bantu tongue; so in its roots, but not in its
prefixes, is the celebrated Ki-swahili of Zanzibar. Ci-bodzo of the Zambezi
delta is also an archaic type of great interest. The Zulu-Kaffir language,
though it exhibits marked changes and deviations in vocabulary and
phonetics (both probably of recent date), preserves a few characteristics
of the hypothetical mother-tongue: so much so that, until the languages of
the Great Lakes came to be known, Zulu-Kaffir was regarded as the most
archaic type of Bantu speech, a position from which it is now completely
deposed. It is in some features unusually divergent from the typical Bantu.

_Classifica