Davis (Rev. William J.)

A DICTIONARY OF THE K****R LANGUAGE

Including the Xosa and Zulu dialects. Part 1 : K****r – English

Published: The Wesleyan Mission House, London, 1872

Stock Number: 13311

Price: R3,200

First edition: 260 pages, rebound in quarter brown morroco with matching cloth boards, titled gilt on the spine, a fragment of the original title is loosely inserted, 8vo (220 x150mm), a very good copy.

University of Cape Town (https://emandulo.apc.uct.ac.za/collection/FHYA%20Depot/A_Dictionary_of_the_Kaffir_Language_Kaff.pdf#:~:text=this%20the%20first%20Dictionary%20of%20the%20language), 'This is the first dictionary of the isiXhosa language (then universally termed "Kaffir" in colonial literature) and one of the foundational works of Bantu lexicography. 'Rev. William J. Davis was a Wesleyan missionary who served in the Eastern Cape. His dictionary was compiled after decades of missionary linguistic labour that began with the Rev. W.B. Boyce's A Grammar of the Kaffir Language (1834). Davis dedicated the volume to Rev. William Shaw, the first Wesleyan missionary in Kaffraria, noting that Shaw had been the principal instrument in establishing "prosperous churches, numbering many thousands of members, who have been raised from the darkness of heathenism to Christian light and civilization." 'The work appeared in two parts: Part I: Kaffir–English (1872) — the volume in question. Part II: English–Kaffir (1877) — published five years later. The dictionary reflects the missionary philological tradition of the nineteenth century: rigorous, alphabetised, and designed to aid evangelism and translation. It is today a primary source for historians of the Eastern Cape frontier, linguists studying early isiXhosa and isiZulu, and bibliographers of Africana.'