Ican have one dog or two dogs. One sprained ankle or two sprained ankles. Making the plural in English is not exactly rocket science.

But there’s a land far, far away where making a plural seems like a game some kid made up. A thief is a kaam. If there’s more than one, then there are kaam-a.So, you just add -a, right? Well, no. An eye is nuungi, but eyes are not nuung-a.They’re k-uungi.For some reason you change the first sound instead of adding a sound at the end. Then there are words that for some reason do both of the things we just saw. A side is a nundang. Sides are k-undang-a.

And it just gets worse. It’s like grammar as acid trip. Some words add an -i instead of an – a. Some plurals just make no sense at all: A child is a kwe.Now, we have a weird plural for child, children — but in this language, the singular is kwe, but the plural is dogala!

And don’t even get me started on the verbs in this language.For some verbs, the way to say that he did something instead of that I did it, you make the first two letters in the word switch places! “I hit” is lodi, “he hit” is oldi. Then with others, to say “he did it,” you tack some sound to the word you use to say “I did it,” and you just have to know which sound for each verb.”I bought” is ula,”he bought” is jula — but “I dug” is urto,”he dug” is not jurto but kurto, for no particular reason. And these aren’t the irregular verbs — they’re the normal ones. We’ll just pass the irregular verbs in silence!

Then there are things about the language that are just fun. Their sound for what a dog does is wowowing! kind of like our bowwow but with that nice flip at the end. Or, somehow their sound for a lion’s roar is oo-oo-ing! which doesn’t sound like a lion to me, but they are in a better position to know than I am.

And that is a clue that the people who speak this language live in Africa.

This is the Fur language, one of the main languages of Darfur, the Land of the Fur, that is. Of course, this is the area in Sudan where 400,000 dark-skinned Africans have been killed over the past few years, while 2 million have been driven from their homes.

We’re all straight on what an abomination it was that we let genocide happen in Rwanda. President Clinton has apologized for that. We’ve heard Samantha Power’s articulate interviews based on her book “A Problem From Hell.” We know about Hitler, we know about “Never Again.”

And yet, our headlines chatter on about Mark Foley’s text messages, a movie about Queen Elizabeth, and Madonna adopting a single African child — from Malawi.

Despite plans to send some thousands of U.N. troops into Darfur, there is a certain urgency lacking in the American and the world’s response to Darfur compared to, for example, what America did in Bosnia.

Surely part of the reason is that the Bosnian cast of characters seemed more like us — Westerners, literate. And yes, white.

But race alone is a crude metric here. We know, intellectually, that the Darfur people are human beings. As it happens, their sound for a beating heart is beetbeeting, almost as if they were trying to sound like English speakers! But we don’t meet them. They don’t use the Internet.We don’t know anything interesting about them.

This, then, is my small attempt to show one: Their language is so complicated that learning it after toddlerhood could be dangerous to one’s mental health. It’s also, for the record, an especially precious language in that it doesn’t have any close relatives like English has German and

Swedish. It’s a hothouse plant.

The insults are good, too. One memorable one is “Your anus is rough and stinking and you have not plucked its hairs!”Another one is “It’s your sandal.” The Fur use it to tell someone to deal with something themselves — “It’s your sandal, not mine.”

There are many reasons that Darfur should be as urgent a horror to us as it would be if in France, Jean-Marie Le Pen took power and started working on a sequel to the Final Solution. One is their powerlessness. Another is their humanity.As to a truly vivid indication of the latter, maybe this is just the linguist in me talking, but I think one thing that should qualify as showing their humanity is that so many of the people speak a language that is harder to master than quantum mechanics.

Contemplating their language is, at least, one of many ways we can get in touch with thinking of the Darfur victims as persons rather than as statistics, and one more step toward a wider understanding that the Darfur victims are our sandal, too.

Mr. McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.