Note 146 — Chapter IV · PHONOLOGY AND SEMATOLOGY.

Bleek: “A brief Account of Bushman Folklore, and other Texts,” p. 6. “A most curious feature in Bushman folklore is formed by the speeches of various animals, recited in modes of pronouncing Bushman, said to be peculiar to the animals in whose mouths they are placed. It is a remarkable attempt to imitate the shape or position of the mouth of the kind of animal to be represented. Among the Bushman sounds which are hereby affected, and often entirely commuted, are principally the clicks. These are either converted into other consonants, as into labials (in the language of the Tortoise), or into palatals and compound dentals and sibilants (as in the language of the Ichneumon), or into clicks otherwise unknown in Bushman (as far as our present experience goes), as in the language of the Jackal, who is introduced as making use of a strange labial click, which bears to the ordinary labial click a relation in sound similar to that which the palatal click bears to the cerebral click. Again, the Moon—and it seems also the Hare and the Anteater—substitute a most unpronounceable click in place of all others, excepting the lip click. Another animal, the Blue Crane, differs in its speech from the ordinary Bushman, mainly by the insertion of a tt at the end of the first syllable of almost every word.”