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Excerpt from Grammar of the Bórnu or Kanuri Language
IT is with' heartfelt gratitude to the Giver of every good gift, that! Take up my pen to write a few remarks pre fatory to the following Grammar of the Kanuri language, which is spoken in the very heart of Africa. God has been pleased to preserve my life, to bestow fresh health after many an attack of fever, and to grant me energy and perseverance for the pursuit of my solitary and difficult studies, in the unhealthy and enervating climate of Sierra Leone, till the work was thus far accomplished. During my stay on the Western Coast of Africa' (from December 1847 till February the cultivation of the Kanuri language occupied me almost three full years. As there was no native literature, considerable time was required, merely to bring some satisfactory portion of the language before my view: and then what a chaos of forms did it present! I had often just ¿attered myself to have discovered a rule, when, all at once, a new expression from my interpre ter not only disappointed my hopes, but added to the previous difficulties. When I commenced my Kanuri studies, nothing whatever had been written on the grammar of that lan guage. Neither was any thing known as to its general cha racter; so that I was left to pursue my way through an entirely unknown region, where every step brought new and strange objects under my notice, contrary to every thing that I could have anticipated. Under such circumstances, two op posite errors are to be avoided on the one hand there is the danger of being carried away by a desire for the new and the strange, so as to make common things look uncommon; and, on the other hand, that incredulity is to be guarded against.
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