Page:An Australian language as spoken by the Awabakal.djvu/52

 xlii INTEODUCTION.

degree of error, which affects also iiiauy other lists of Australian words. Australian vocabularies are made often by Englishmen, ■who, in wi-iting the words, follow the sounds of the vowels as used in English, and sometimes even their own vices of pi'onunciation ; for instance, k inner is written down for kinna, and i-ya for ai-ya. Again, a blackfellow, when asked to give the equivalents for English words, sometimes fails to understand, and so puts one word for another ; thus, in some lists that I have seen, the word for ' I ' is set down as meaning ' thou '; and even in printing mis- takes occur ; for, in Mr. Taplin's list of South Austi-alian dialects ' we ' is gun, and ' you ' is gun also ; the former should probably be gen ; and kambiyanna is made to mean both 'your father' and 'his father.'

The Fh'st Pronoun. — Making all due allowance for such defects, I pi'oceed to examine the Australian pronouns, an;l I find that, notwithstanding the multitude of their dialect-forms, they have only a very few bases. These are, for the first pronoun — Ga-ad, ga-ta, ga-ad-du, ba, mi, mo; and, for the second pronoun — (jin, gin-da, gin-du, bi, bu, gula. I leave the demonstrative or third pronoun out of account, as it is not of so much importance to our inquiry. Now, the existence of' the base ga-ad is proved by the forms (given above), ga-an, ga-na ; the base ga-ta recurs in gatha, ga-ya, ni-te ; ga-ad-du, in gad-thu, na-thu, a-thu, ga-tu-ko, ifec. ; ba gives wa-an, a-an, and, in South Australia, ga- pa, ga-ap, a-pa; mo and mi are merely softened forms of ba, and are found in mo-to, wo-kok, mi-na, wi-nak, ga-mi. Even so unpromising a form as un-ca (Queensland) connects itself with the base ga-ta through gii-ca (South Australia); for some Melanesiaii dialects prefer to begin words with a vowel, and so transpose the letters of an initial dissyllable; thus, lin-ca is for ug-ca^ gu-ca:=ga-ta.* Most of the dialect fonns of this pronoun given above arise from the interchange of ng, n, and y ; the Wiradhari dialect, for example, has gaddu, naddu, yaddu, 'I,' and these become more liquid still in yallu, -ladu.f Let us observe here, also, that the Tasmanian forms ma-na, mi-na, ' I,' come from the base ma, mi. I have above given six bases for the first pronoun in Australian, and yet there are only two — ad or ta and ba; for mi and mo are only ba differently vocalised, and, in the other three, ga- is a prefix, as will be shown further on, while the -du of ga- ad-du is an emphatic suffix.

��* The Aneityumese (Ebudan) language is so fond of an initial vowel that it constantly dislocates a consonant in favour of a vom'cI. Our Australian Vocabularies in this volume have very few words beginning with vowels.

+ .See Appendix, page (iO. Dr. Caldwell was led into error by the form gadlu, which an authority told him meant ' we ' in South Australia. Used alone, it is only 'I,' for gaddu.

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