Page:An Australian language as spoken by the Awabakal.djvu/45

 iNTEODrcTiON". xxxr

YII. MlSCELLAIfEOUS TeST "WoRDS.

(a.) There are just two or three other words which I would glance at very rapidly. The Malay kutu means ' louse '; in all Polynesia also that word means 'louse'; therefore, as some persons say, the South 8ea Islanders inust be Malay-Polynesians. But I find that in Aueityum also, a Papuan region, in-ket is 'louse,' and in South Australia kiita, and in other parts of Australia, kii-lo, gullun. To complete the analogy, tliese per- sons should now say that the Papuans of the New Hebrides and the blacks of South Australia are Malay. This looks like a reductio ad absurdum.

(b.) The word kutu reminds me that there are some very un- savoury words, which are a strong proof of identity of origin among races ; for, if these words have not come from one common source, it is scarcely possible to imagine how they are so much alike. For instance, gū-nung here means stercus Jiominis aut hesfiac ; in Sanskrit the root-verb is gu. In Samoan, (k)i-no is 'excrement,' the same word as gū-nung. Among our Port Stephens blacks, the worst of the evil spirits is called gūnuug- dhakia='sfercus edens.' In Hebrew, a variant for the name Beelzebub is Beelzeḃūl, which means dominus stercoris. Again, kak is an Aryan root-verb; in New Gruinea it becomes tage {t for k, as is common) ; in New Britain, tak ; in Samoa, ta'e ; m Aueityum, no-hok and na-heh. The Sanskrit bhaga, which I need not translate, is in Piji maga ; and in Tasmania maga; and pi, mi, as I have already shown, is as old as the Assyrians.

(c.) The Tasmanian word for ' sun ' is pugganubrana or pukkanebrena or pallanubrana or panubrana, according to Milligan's list. Of these, the first is clearly the original form, for the last is merely a contraction of it, and the third substitutes liorg. The last syllable -n a is formative, and is exceedingly common in Tasmanian Avords ; it is, I may observe in passing, exactly the same syllable which is used as a common sufiix to form nouns in New Guinea and in the Albannic group, and in a slightly different way also in Aueityum. The remainder of the Tasmanian word is pugga and nubra. Now, nubra or nubre in Tasmanian is ' the eye,' but the vocabularies of that language do not enlighten me as to the meaning of pugga. I ■would write it biig-a, and connect it with the New Britain word bug (pronounced bung), which means ' day'; thus biiganubra would mean ' the eye of day,' that is, ' the sun '; and that is exactly the meaning of mata-ari, the Malay word for the ' sun.' The Ebudan of Santo has bog, ' day,' and the Fijian for ' sun' is mata-ni-senga. Bug is allied to the Dravidian pag-al, pare the derivation of the English word ' day.'
 * day.' Bug I take from the Sk. bha, ' to shine '; with this com-

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