Hottentot (racial term) in an ethnic sense. From the eighteenth century onwards, the term "hottentot" was also a term of abuse without a specific ethnic sense, comparable to "barbarian" or "cannibal". In its ethnic sense, it had developed connotations of savagery and primitivism soon already in the seventeenth century: colonial depictions of the Hottentots (Khoikhoi) in the seventeenth to eighteenth century were characterized by savagery, often suggestive of cannibalism or the consumption of raw flesh, physiological features such as steatopygia and elongated labia perceived as primitive or "simian"; and a perception of the click sounds in the Khoikhoi languages as "bestial". Thus it
Hottentot (racial term) "hodmandod" in the years around 1700. The reduced Afrikaans/Dutch form "hotnot" has also been borrowed into South African English as an offensive term for black people. In seventeenth-century Dutch, "Hottentot" was at times used to denote all black people (synonymously with "Kaffir"), but at least some speakers were careful to use the term "Hottentot" to denote what they thought of as a race distinct from the supposedly darker-skinned "Kaffirs". This distinction between the non-Bantu "Cape Blacks" and the Bantu was noted as early as 1684 by French anthropologist François Bernier. The idea that "Hottentot" referred strictly to the non-Bantu peoples