Neither do the natives add to _every_ verb all the prefixes and suffixes that can grammatically be affixed to them. It is very apparent that some verbs are complicated with causative, prepositional, tense, and other forms, and it is necessary to know for what the polysyllabic word stands as a phrase, as there is no time to dissect it while a speech is in progress. This is what I think the native does. He has no words for the parts of speech as we have in grammar, he does not know that _bakamokangelela ntaba nxinga_ is made up of the nominative pronominal prefix _ba_ = they, the present tense progressive _ka_ = ing, the objective pronominal prefix _mo_ = him, the verb _kanga_ = tie, the two prepositional suffixes _ela_ = for, and _ela_ = with (the “a” elides before “e”), and two objective nouns _ntaba_ = goat, and _nxinga_ = string; but he knows that _bakamokangelela ntaba nxinga_ means “they are tying the goat for him with string.” And if you, as a white man, while speaking and translating, try to make new polysyllabic words by a new combination of prefixes and suffixes, then you confuse your hearers (or readers) to such an extent that they do not readily follow you. You will have to educate them to a proper understanding of your new phrases, as English folk had to learn Carlyle’s picture-phrases a generation ago before they could appreciate their force and beauty. It seems that in the course of time the various dialects have become more or less stereotyped in the use of certain verbal suffixes, and if a speaker now creates new combinations the hearers do not at once follow him; or it may be that at some period in the past when a dialect was in the making the minds of the people were very active, and the combinations they formed are fixed and remembered, and no new ones are being made, as the minds of the present generation are less gymnastic; or, again, it may be that a man with some pretensions to intellectual power created new combinations of verbal suffixes, and impressed them on his generation, and thus superseded other word-phrases as Chaucer’s English has been succeeded by a later form, and that by a still later, and the forms of speech used by his characters have given place to later forms that would have been scarcely understood in his day. However, in the Bantu languages there are such possibilities of infinite combinations that as the natives are now being educated it is impossible to foretell what subtleties of thought they will be able to express accurately with so plastic and beautiful a language. The Boloki dialect, like all the Bantu languages, is alliterative in construction, i.e. the prefix of the nominative of the sentence becomes the prefix of all the words dependent on it, e.g.: _ma_toko _ma_na _ma_bale _ma_nene _mama_nsombela we _ma_laba, (literally) spoons those two large (which me/bought for) you they are lost