[A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone’s Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries by David Livingstone]@TWC D-Link book
A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone’s Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries

CHAPTER XIV
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Every knoll, hill, mountain, and every peak on a range has a name; and so has every watercourse, dell, and plain.

In fact, every feature and portion of the country is so minutely distinguished by appropriate names, that it would take a lifetime to decipher their meaning.

It is not the want, but the superabundance of names that misleads travellers, and the terms used are so multifarious that good scholars will at times scarcely know more than the subject of conversation.

Though it is a little apart from the topic of the attention which the headmen pay to agriculture, yet it may be here mentioned, while speaking of the fulness of the language, that we have heard about a score of words to indicate different varieties of gait--one walks leaning forward, or backward, swaying from side to side, loungingly, or smartly, swaggeringly, swinging the arms, or only one arm, head down or up, or otherwise; each of these modes of walking was expressed by a particular verb; and more words were used to designate the different varieties of fools than we ever tried to count.
Mr.Moffat has translated the whole Bible into the language of the Bechuana, and has diligently studied this tongue for the last forty-four- years; and, though knowing far more of the language than any of the natives who have been reared on the Mission-station of Kuruman, he does not pretend to have mastered it fully even yet.

However copious it may be in terms of which we do not feel the necessity, it is poor in others, as in abstract terms, and words used to describe mental operations.
Our third day's march ended in the afternoon of the 27th September, 1863, at the village of Chinanga on the banks of a branch of the Loangwa.


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