Viewing page 74 of 98

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

an inferior race, & refuse to have any connection with them, or to participate in their employments.  Among the many coffee carriers & street-porters whom I examined in Rio, I did not find a single Mina. It is not unusual to find those among them who can read & write Arabic, & all whom I questioned, could repeat sentences of this language. -- By far the greater number of those slaves who purchase their own freedom belong to this class.

It is worth remarking, that those blacks usually receive good treatment, owing to the fear ^[[in]] which they are held - & not without reason.  The late insurrection in Bahia, [[strikethrough]]is said[[/strikethrough]] which was put down with so much difficulty, is said to have been planned & carried into effect altogether by the Minas, who are more numerous in that city than elsewhere. They had gone as far as to establish a regular system of government, as well as a national [[custom?]], - & I have seen - one of the circulars, written in Arabic, which were handed round secretly ^[[by the leaders,]] exhorting their fellow-captives to this effort for the recovery of their liberty.

As has been before observed, there are many tribes or nations of Minas, & they speak languages the vocabularies of which show a radical difference.  Nevertheless there appear to be certain general characteristics in which they resemble one another, & by which they are distinguished from the dialects of [[strikethrough]]the[[/strikethrough]] Southern Africa. One of these is their [[strikethrough]]sound[[?]] of[[/strikethrough]] pronunciation, which is harsh & even hoarse, to a degree that I have never known in any other class of languages. This does not [[proceed?]] from [[strikethrough]]the[[/strikethrough]] an unusual number of guttural letters, but from the general enunciation, which resembles in character, though much exaggerated, that which prevails in some provinces of Germany.

Another characteristic appears to be the ^[[simplicity, or rather]] [[strikethrough]][[[? of]][[/strikethrough]] deficiency in grammatical forms. -- This is a point on which I cannot speak with as much confidence, as the opportunities for investigation were scanty. But in those dialects which I examined, I could distinguish no grammatical inflections either for gender or number in the noun, or for person, tense & mood in the verb. In this respect, the difference between the dialects of North & South Guinea is particularly remarkable