South o f the Desert we find other languages spoken b y the blacks ; and are told by Arabs who have frequently performed the journ e y from Jinnie to Cairo, and the Red Sea, that thirty- three different Negroe languages are met with in the course of that route, but that the Arabic is spoken by the intelligent part o f the people, and the Mohammedan religion is known and followed by many ; their writings are uniformly in Arabic. It may not be improper in this place, seeing the many errors and mutilated translations which appear from time to time o f A rabic, Turkish, and Persian papers, to giv e a list o f the Mohammedan moons or lunar months, used by all those nations, which begin with the first appearance o f the new moon, that is, the day following, or sometimes two days after the change, and continue till th e y see the next new moon; these have been mutilated to such a degree in all our English translations, that I shall giv e them, in the original Arabic character, and as they ought to be spelt and pronounced in the English character, as a clue whereby to calculate the correspondence between our year and theirs. T h e y divide the year into 12 months, which contain 29 or SO days, according as they see the new moon; the first day o f the month Muharam is termed ,*lxM Ras Elame, i. e. the beginning o f the year. A s we are more used to the A siatic mode o f punctuation, that w ill be observed in these words. Muharam AsafFei A rab ia Elule Arabea Atthenie Juntad Elule Jumad Athenie Rajeb Shaban <3 Languages o f Africa. 225 Ramadan D u ’elkada Shual Du Elhagah The first o f Muharram, year o f the Hejira 1221, answers to the 19th March o f the Christian sera, 1806. Among the various languages spoken south o f the Desert, or Sahara, we have already observed that there are thirty-three different ones between the Western Ocean and the Red Sea, following the shores o f the Nile El A bide, or Niger : among all these nations and empires, a man p ra ctically acquainted with the Arabic may always make himself understood, and indeed it is the language most requisite to be known for eve ry traveller in these extensive regions. T h e Mandinga is spoken from the banks o f the Senegal, where that river takes a northerly course from the Jibel Kumera to the kingdom o f Bambarra; the Wangareen tongue is a different one ; and the Houssonians speak a language differing again from that. Specimen o f the difference between the Arabic and Mandinga language ; the words o f the latter extracted from the vocabularies of Seedi Mohammed ben Amer Soudani. ENGLISH. MANDINGA ARABIC. One Kalen Wahu d Two Fula Thanine Three Seba Thalata Four Nani A rba F iv e Lulu Kumsa Six Uruh Setta
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