The minor characteristics of the Kisawahili are the peculiarities of the negative system in substantives and adjectives, pronouns, adnouns, and verbs; for instance, Asie, he or she who is not, Isie, it which is not. Secondly, are the broad lines of distinction drawn between words denoting the rational and the irrational, and in a minor degree the rational-animate (as man), and the rational-inanimate (as ass). In most cases the rational-animate affixes Wa as a plural sign: the irrational- animate Ma. Umbu, a sister, properly makes Waumbu, sisters: the ignorant, however, and the Islanders often say Maumbu (sisters) like Map’hunda (asses). Thus personality supplies the place of gender, a phenomenon that already dawns in the Persian and in other Indo-European tongues. Next is the artful and intricated system of irregular plurals, and last, not least, the characteristic alliteration, an assonance apparently the debris of many ancient dialects based upon an euphonious concord not always appreciable by us, and therefore not yet subjected by our writers to rule. We understand, for instance, that an alliterative speaker should say Mtu mema (a good man), and Watu wema (good men); but why is the regularity altered to Máháli _p_ángo (my place), p’hunda _z_ango (my donkey), and Mtu _wa_ Rashidi (Rashid’s man), instead of mango, pango, and ma? These distinctions appear far too empirical, arbitrary, and artificial for the wants of primitive speech. The Kisawahili is an oral tongue—an illiterate language in the sense assigned to the term by Professor Lepsius. The people, like the Somal and the Gallas, never invented a syllabarium. This absence of alphabet is a curious proof of deficient constructiveness in a race that cultivates rude eloquence, and that speaks dialects which express even delicate shades of meaning: it contrasts wonderfully with the Arabs and Hindus, who adapt to each language some form of Phœnician or Dewanagari. The coast races use the modern Arabic alphabet, which, admirable for its proper purpose, represents African sounds imperfectly, as those of Sindi and Turkish, and is condemned to emulate the anomalous orthography or cacography of our English. The character is large, square, and old- fashioned, resembling later Kufic even more than that of Harar, and he must be a first-rate scholar who can read at sight all the letter of a man to his friend. Literature is confined, to a few sheets upon the subject of Báo or Uganga (Raml or geomancy), to proverbs and proverbial sayings, mostly quatrains; to riddles and rabbit tales, which here represent the hare legends of the Namaquas and the spider stories of the Gold Coast; to Mashairi, or songs rhymeless, measureless, and unmusical, and to ‘Utenzi,’ religious poems, and eulogies of the brave.