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four great sections:--(a) the languages of the Great Lakes and the East Coast down to and including the Zambezi basin; (b) the South-Central group (_Bechuana-Zulu_); (c) the languages of the South-West, from the southern part of the Belgian Congo to Damaraland and the Angola-Congo coast; and (d) the Western group, including all the Central and Northern Congo and Cameroon languages, and probably also group No. 2 of the Albert Nyanza and Semliki river. _Common Features_.--There is no mistaking a Bantu language, which perhaps is what renders the study of this group so interesting and encouraging. The homogeneity of this family is so striking, as compared with the inexplicable confusion of tongues which reigns in Africa north of the Bantu borderland, that the close relationships of these dialects have perhaps been a little exaggerated by earlier writers. The phonology of the Western group (d) is akin to that of the Negro languages of Western and West-Central Africa. A small portion of (b) the South-Central group (_Zulu_) has picked up clicks, perhaps borrowed from the Hottentots and Bushmen. Otherwise, the three groups (a), (b) and (c) are closely related in phonology, and never, except here and there on the borders of the Western group, adopt the peculiar West African combinations of _kp_ and _gb_, which are so characteristic of African speech between the Upper Nile and the Guinea coast. The following propositions may be laid down to define the special or peculiar features of the Bantu languages:-- (1) They are agglutinative in their construction, the syntax being formed by adding prefixes principally and also suffixes to the root, but no infixes (that is to say, no mutable syllable incorporated into the middle of the root-word).[7] (2) The root excepting its terminal vowel is practically unchanging, though its first or penultimate vowel or consonant may be modified in pronunciation by the preceding prefix, or the last vowel in the same way by the succeeding suffix. (3) The vowels of the Bantu languages are always of the Italian type, and no true Bantu language includes obscure sounds like _oe_ and _ue_. Each word must end in a vowel (though in some modern dialects in Eastern Equatorial, West and South Africa the terminal vowel may be elided in rapid pronunciation, or be dropped, or absorbed in the terminal consonant, generally a nasal). No two consonants can come together without an intervening vowel, except in
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