Book Description

Excerpt from African Native Literature: Or Proverbs, Tales, Fables,& Historical Fragments in the Kanuri or Bornu Language, to Which Are Added a Translation of the Above and a Kanuri-English Vocabulary I have now the pleasure of introducing to the friends of Africa, who are interested in its languages and people, the last volume which has resulted from my lingual researches during a five years' stay in Sierra Leone. It connects itself with the Bornu Grammar, lately published, and contains a limited selection from the manuscript literature on which that Grammar is based, and a Vocabulary of the same language. These three parts, the Grammar, the native Literature, and the Vocabulary, will be found to form something complete, as far as they go, in one of the most important Negro languages, hitherto unknown. The narratives which are here communicated deserve special attention: they are not compositions, formed with difficulty by a foreigner, but they are the work of a genuine Negro mind, both in conception and expression; in them we hear a real Negro tongue speaking to us, we hear tales in the same language, and about the same words, in which they have been told over and over again to beguile many an idle hour in a land where nature's richest bounties are obtained without almost any labour. Here, therefore, the student has the proper means presented to him by which a correct and thorough acquaintance with the language may be acquired. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.