Meanwhile, to the degradation of character which came from the possession of slaves by a people naturally narrow in view and necessarily ignorant through their unfortunate environment, was added the creation and cultivation of a curious _patois_, or Afrikander dialect, which increased their isolation and intensified the problems of the future. The Huguenots had been compelled to learn and to speak Dutch, and probably did not do it very well; the Boers were themselves compelled to frequently speak the language of the natives; there was no school system and no sifting of the culture of a higher class of permanent residents down through the grades of other settlers; there was no emigration of population from Holland which might have helped to maintain the _morale_ of the language; and the result was the evolution of a dialect which became neither Dutch nor French, nor native, but a mixture of all three called the _Taal_. Olive Schreiner has given the following explanation and description[2] of this product of seventeenth century evolution amongst the Boers: "The Dutch of Holland is as highly developed a language and as voluminous and capable of expressing the finest scintillations of thought as any in Europe. The vocabulary of the _Taal_ has shrunk to a few hundred words, which have been shorn of almost all their inflections and have been otherwise clipped.... Of the commonest pronouns many are corrupted out of all resemblance to their originals. Of nouns and other words of Dutch extraction most are so clipped as to be scarcely recognizable. A few words are from Malay and other native sources; but so sparse is the vocabulary and so broken are its forms that it is impossible in the _Taal_ to express a subtle emotion, an abstract conception, or a wide generalization." [2] _The Story of South Africa_. By W. Basil Worsfold, M.A. London, 1898. [Sidenote: The Batavian Republic]