East African Bantuists and others farther south have noticed the -e stem cropping up sporadically and unexpectedly in verbal forms and this exposition is an attempt to explain them.
One has realized the dominant importance of ‘state’ in Bantu and seen that, during the development of the languages, time tenses have been formed by inflexion, and in the endeavour to fit these tenses into the framework of the indicative mood one has tended to lose sight of the principles of state. The chaotic diversity of inflexions used to express future or past time in different language groups suggests the comparatively modern development of these tenses.