Page:An Australian language as spoken by the Awabakal.djvu/42

 similarly the Hebrew (a) illäm, 'dumb,' comes from the verb alam, 'to bind,' 'to be silent'; in the Gospels, the blind man's eyes were ' opened,' and Zacharias, who had been for a time dumb, had ' his mouth opened and his tongue loosed.' The root of our Australian words boko, muga, is therefore the same as the Sanskrit mu, 'to bind.' Trom the same source come the Samoan pu-puni, 'to shut,' po, 'night'; the Aneityumese at-apn-es (apn=pan), 'to shut,' nā-poi, 'dark clouds'; the New Britain bog, 'clouded,' and the Tukiok bog, 'to cover up'; cf. the Sanskrit bhuka, 'darkness.' In Aneityum, a-pat is 'dark,' 'deaf,' and po-p is 'dumb.' In Malay, puk-kah (cf. mu-ga) is 'deaf,' and bu-ta is 'blind'; ba-bat (cf. ba-ba, bo-bo) is to 'bind'; Fiji has bu-ki-a, 'to tie,' 'to fasten'; New Zealand has pu-pu, 'to tie in bundles,' pu, 'a tribe,' 'bunch,' 'bundle.' It is even possible that our English words bind, bunch, bundle, come, through the Anglo-Saxon, from this same root, ba, bu, mu.

I suppose that these examples will sufEce to prove that the similarity between the Australian boko and the Polynesian, poko is not a mere coincidence. AVhere have we room now for the theory that the natives of the South Sea Islands are of Malay origin? I might, with equal justice, say that they came from the Hunter River district in Australia, if I were to look only at the words boko and poko!

Results.—The ideas 'blind,' 'deaf,' 'dumb,' may be reduced to the simple idea 'bound'—the eyes, ears, mouth, or tongue 'closed, bound, tied.' This idea is, in the Aryan languages, expressed mostly by mu, but, in our Eastern languages, by ba, bo; mu, mo; pu, po; all these root-forms are identical, and are the basis of cognate words spreading from the region of ultima Thule across the world to Tahiti. Can this be the result of accident, or of the spontaneous creation of language in several different centres? Is it not rather proof of a common origin? Even in the development of the root, there is a singular correspondence; for the Sanskrit adds-ka, and so do the Malay, the Kamalarai, the Santoan, and the Polynesian; others use t for k.

(c.) The word for 'eye' also may be useful as a sample test-word, for it is not likely to be subject to the influences of change to which I have already referred. In Tasmania a word for 'eye' is mongtena, and the common word in all Australia is mi or mil, or some other simple derived form from the root mi. Mongtena is in Milligan's "Vocabulary of the Dialects of the Aboriginal Tiibes of Tasmania," but I have never found that Vocabulary to be satisfactory either as to its phonetics or its critical sagacity. I therefore suppose that the real form is ma-a g&#x34F;&#x307;-ta-na ; for mong-ta-linna is there the word for 'eyelash,' and mong-to-ne is 'to see'; at all events, I consider ma to be its original stem, while the