Page:An Australian language as spoken by the Awabakal.djvu/33

 lyTRODUCTIOX. XXIU

anian lias plr, and with this correspond the Dravidian pir-a, ' before,' the Australian pir, ' one,' and the Turkic, bir, ' one.' In Sanskrit, tlie old ablative form purd means ' formerly,' ' first '; cognates are the Gr. j^aros, ' before,' and the Zen^jyara, 'before.'

(J). But the most common word for 'one' in New South "Wales is wakul. In fact, it is our Sydney word for ' one,' and there can be no doubt of its genuineness, for it is noted by Lieut. -Colonel Collins as a Port Jackson word in his book on the Colony, published 1802; he spells it wogul. At Newcastle it waswakol; in the Williams River district, wakul-bo, and on the Manning, wakul. From my manuscript notes I write down the various forms which this word assumes, beginning with Tasmania and passing northwards to the Timor Sea : — Tasmania, mara-i, mara-wa ; in Victoria, bur ; on the Murray Eiver near Wentworth and Euston, mo, mata, mada, meta-ta; on the middle course of the Darling, waichola ; on the Upper Murray, mala; on Monero Plains, yalla; at Moruya, med- endaf; in the Murrumbidgee district, mit-ong ; at Jervis Bay, met-ann; on Groulburn Plains, met-ong ; in the lUawarra district, mit-ung; at Appin, wogul; at Sydney and north- wards to the Manning River and the Hastings, wakul; on Liverpool Plains, mal; at Wellington, mal-and a ; in southern Queensland, byada, muray, baja, b3^aya; in the Northern Territory of South Australia, mo-tu, wa-rat, wa-dat.

Besides these, some other words for the number 'one' are used in various parts of Australia, but those that I have given all pro- ceed from the original root, which it will be our duty now to discover. And I notice, first of all, that one word in the list stretches along the whole extent of seaboard from the Illawarra district to the Hastings — the word wakul — and this fact affords the presumption that all that coast line was occupied by the same tribe, or by tribes closely akin; for the tribes a little inland say mal and mal-anda for ' one.' Wakul, then, was the word used by the Sydney blacks, as Collins testifies. If a chemist has a compound substance handed to him for analysis, he experiments on it, and tests it in order to discover its elements. Let us do so with wakul ; it is a compound, for simple roots are usually monosyllables ; but are its parts wa + kul orwak + ul? Here I remember that, in the same region where wakul exists, there is a word kara-kal, ' a wizard,' 'a doctor or medicine-man,' but inland he is called kara-ji. This satisfies me as proof that the -kul is merely a formative syllable, and that the root is wa. And this conviction is strengthened when I cast my eye over the above list of words ; for they all begin with the sjdlable ma or some modification of it, the rest of each word consisting of various formative syllables. As I have now got hold of a clue to a solution, I reflect that the initial labial of a root-word may

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