B. Gwari, which was given a mallam to read, two lines had been accidentally omitted, this did not disconcert him at all, and he inserted them as he read. To test him, one or two lines were picked out at random and he was asked to read them, and though, when repeating the whole poem, he had apparently been able to do so easily, it was with the greatest difficulty that he deciphered the lines when presented to him one at a time.
The war songs are very simple, and most districts have their own.
The people are very fond of verbal competitions, such as riddles, naming as many trees, birds, animals, &c., as possible without pausing, or like our "Peter Piper picked, &c."
Ex. Babba ba ya ba babba baba ba.
It is probably partly due to this trait in the national character that the vocabulary of the language is so much more full ("da zurufi" as they say themselves) than that of its neighbours.
So much more expressive is it, that it is no uncommon thing to find two natives of the same tribe prefer to converse together in Hausa (Kanuri, Fulani, &c.).
The grammatical structure of Hausa is essentially simple, and there is little doubt that it belongs to a group of Central African languages as yet unclassified.
The very fact that a considerable number of records are derived from Arabic, while the grammar is entirely different, tends to show that the original vocabulary was limited.
In the older proverbs Arabic words are not frequent.
