To a certain extent he will be able to preserve its form and spirit in copying the manner of a little child, as it lisps its mother tongue. But this would not preserve all its peculiarities. Its true counterpart is only to be found in the "pigeon" English of a Chinaman or, better still, in the Negro dialects of the Southern American States. In the stories of _Brer-Fox_ and _Brer-Rabbit_, as told by the old Southern slave in _Uncle Remus_, we have one of the few literary examples of such a speech as the Taal. In both languages there is the same poverty of vocabulary, the same abbreviated condition of words, the same clipping of forms, and the same much larger intelligence in the speakers than ill-formed language gives them the power of expressing--a thing which can never happen where a people has _slowly_ shaped its own language--and, as a result, the same tendency to suggest indirectly ideas which the speaker has not the power of directly stating, from which results the irresistible humour of both dialects. It is often complained of by persons lately from England, that when the English South African has a joke to make, or comic story to tell, he lapses into the Taal, which is not understood by the newcomer; the truth being that it is the use of the Taal which transforms an ordinary sentence into a joke, and makes the simplest story irresistibly comic. There is hardly a South African that has not at some time told a story in the Taal who, when called upon to translate it for the benefit of some stranger, has not found that the humour had evaporated and the laugh gone. Merely to attempt to express a deep passion or complex idea in this dialect is to be often superbly humorous. The story is told of two Cape students whose Edinburgh landlady gave them notice to quit because their laughter disturbed her other lodgers. On inquiry it turned out that they were, for their own diversion, engaged in translating the book of Job into the Taal! And so entirely is the Dutch of South Africa removed from the rich sonorous Dutch of Holland, both in structure and sound, that we were lately requested by a woman, whose native speech was the Taal, to come to her aid, as her newly arrived gardener was a German, whose speech she could not therefore understand. On the gardener appearing, we found he was a Hollander, recently from Amsterdam, and speaking the most excellent Dutch! [18] Though the Scotch of Burns's best poems comes nearer to it. So widely in fact has this dialect separated itself from Dutch that the Boer boy at the Cape working for an examination finds it as hard to pass in literary Dutch as in English or French, and it not infrequently occurs that the Boer boy is plucked in Dutch who passes in all other subjects. Between the language of the _Camera Obscura_ and the _Paarl's Patriot_ there is hardly more affinity than between the old Saxon of Alfred's day and the slang of a modern London street boy.[19]