ve.

The concord may be explained thus:--Let us for a moment reconstruct the
original Bantu mother-tongue (as attempts are sometimes made to deduce the
ancient Aryan from a comparison of the most archaic of its daughters) and
propound sentences to illustrate the repetition of pronominal particles
known as the concord.

_Old Bantu._
_Babo_ _mbaba_-ntu[13] _ba_bi _ba-bo_-ta tu-_ba_-oga.
They these-they person they bad they who kill we fear them.
Rendered into the modern dialect of _Luganda_ this would be:--
_Bo_ _aba_-ntu _ba_-bi _ba_bota tu-_ba_-tia.
They these-they person they bad they who kill we them fear.
(They are bad people who kill; we fear them.)

_Old Bantu._
_Ngu-mu_-ti _ng_uno _ngu_-gwa ku-_ngu_-mbona.
This tree this here this falls; thou this seest?
Rendered into _Kiguha_ of North-West Tanganyika, this would be:--
_U_m_u_ti _gu_no _gu_gwa u_gu_mona?
It tree this here it falls; thou it seest?
(The tree falls; dost thou see it?)

The prefixes and their corresponding particles have varied greatly in form
from the original syllables, as the various Bantu dialects became more and
more corrupt. Assuming these prefixes to have consisted once of two
distinct particles, such as, for example, Nos. 1 and 3, _Ngu-mu-_, or the
6th plural prefix _Nga-ma-_, the first syllable seems to have been of the
nature of a demonstrative pronoun, and the second more like a numeral or an
adjective. _Mu-_ probably meant "one," and _Ma-_ a collective numeral of
indefinite number, applied to liquids (especially water), a tribe of men, a
herd of beasts--anything in the mass.[14] In the corresponding particles of
the concord as applied to adjectives, verbs and pronouns, sometimes the
first syllable, _Ngu_ or _Nga_ was taken for the concord and sometimes the
second _mu_ or _ma_. This would account for the seemingly inexplicable lack
of correspondence between the modern prefix and its accompanying particle,
which so much puzzled Bleek and other early writers on the Bantu languages.
In many of these tongues, for example, the particle which corresponds at
the present day to the plural prefix _Ma-_ is not always _Ma_, but more
often _Ga-_, _Ya-_, _A-_; while to _Mu-_ (Classes 1 and 3) the
corresponding particle