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In subtlety of sound Sokoteri is painfully rich, and we had the greatest difficulty in transcribing the words. They corkscrew their tongues, they gurgle in their throats, and bring sounds from most alarming depths, but luckily they do not click.
Opposite to this hill, and across the stream, is a ruined village, only one house of which is still inhabited; it has circular walls and a circular paddock adjoining it for cattle. It is, perhaps, annoying to have to add another to the list of the many tongues spoken in the world, but I think there is no room for doubt that Sokoteri must be added to that already distracting catalogue.
He was familiar with all the languages spoken in the island, and daily, when the camp was all pitched and arranged, my husband used to produce a long list of Arabic words, and Ammar used to sit on his heels and tell the Mahri and Sokoteri equivalents, the words, however, being for the most part shouted out in chorus by numerous bystanders.
Then there is the cucumber-tree, another hideous-stemmed tree, swollen and whitish; and the hill-slopes covered with this look as if they had been decorated with so many huge composite candles which had guttered horribly. At the top of the candle are a few short branches, on which grow a few stiff crinkly leaves and small yellow flowers, which produce the edible fruit. This tree, in Sokoteri kamh
It is needless to say that all ostensible traces of our cult have long ago been obliterated, and the only Sokoteri religious term which differs in any way from the usual Mohammedan nomenclature is the name for the Devil; but we found, as I have already said, the carved crosses on the flat surface at Eriosh, and we found a rock at the top of a hill to the east of the island which had been covered with rude representations of the Ethiopic cross.
'My age, said Ammar, 'mine well' with evident annoyance and great hesitation 'I'm thirty-five not old not old at all. He is really quite fifty. On such occasions there had to be a tremendous conversation with the bystanders. I will not say more of the language than that instead of our little word I the Sokoteri is hemukomòn and the Mahri evomúhshom.
Of course it is naturally strongly impregnated with words from both these tongues; but the fundamental words of the language are distinct, and in a trilingual parallel list of close on 300 words, which my husband took down in the presence of Mahri, Sokoteri and Arabic speaking people on the island, we found distinctly more in the language derived from an Arab than from a Mahri source.
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