Page:An Australian language as spoken by the Awabakal.djvu/323



The dialect is spoken at Byron Bay and on the Brunswick River. The natives on the Richmond River have a sister dialect called the ; those on the Tweed call their own or, but the  they call. The words and  mean ‘what’? or ‘something,’ for they are used either interrogatively or assertively. Similarly, the words and  mean ‘who’? or ‘somebody.’ These three dialects are so closely related that they may be regarded as one language; it is understood from the Clarence River in New South Wales northward to the Logan in Queensland. For this language the aborigines have no general name.

It is well known that the Australian dialects are agglutinative, everything in the nature of inflection being obtained by suffixes. To this, the is no exception; so that, if I give an account of its suffixes, that is nearly equivalent to giving an exposition of its grammar. It will, therefore, be convenient to take, first, such suffixes as are used with the noun and its equivalents, and, afterwards, those that may be regarded as verbal suffixes. The words that take what may be called the noun-suffixes are (1) Nouns, (2) Adjectives, and (3) Pronouns.

As the same general principles apply to both nouns and adjectives, these may be examined together as to (1) Classification, (2) Number, (3) Gender, (4) Suffixes.