Page:An Australian language as spoken by the Awabakal.djvu/53

 INTEODUCTION. xliii

Here comes in a most important question. Are tliese bases ta and ba exclusively Australian 1 Emphatically I say, No ; for I know that, in Samoan, ta is the pronoun ' I,' and ta (for ta-ua) is 'we two,' 'itais 'me,' and ta-tou is 'we'; la'u (i.e., ta-ku, I for d) is ' my.' I quote the Samoan as the representative of the Polynesian dialects. And yet the Maori pronouns of the first and second pronouns present some interesting features. They are : —

' I,' ' me ' — Ahau, au, awau. ' We two ' — Taua, maua. ' We ' — Tatou, matou, matau. ' My '- — Taku, toku, aku, oku, ahaku. 'Thou' — Koe ; dual, korua, j;?«., koutou. ' Your ' — -Tau, tou, au, on, takorua, takoutou. Here in 'we two,' 'we,' and 'my,' I see both of our Australian base- forms ta and ma; in 'my' I find the Australian possessive genitive suffix ku, gu* ; and in ' we ' I take the -tou to bo for tolu the Polynesian for 'three,' three being used in an indefinite way to mean any number beyond two.f Then, in Fiji, I find that 'I,' ' me ' is au, which may be for ta-u, for the binal form of it is -da-ru (i.e., da-frua, 'two'), the ternal is -da-tou (i.e., da-ftolu, 'three'), and the plural is da. In the Motu dialect of New Guinea, ' I ' is la-u, of which the plural is {inclusive) ai (for ta-i?) &n(\. {exclusive) i-ta. In other parts of New Guinea, ' I ' is d a, ya-u, na-u, na-na, la-u, and, for the plural, ki-ta, i-ta {cf. Samoan). Ebudan parallels are — ' I,' e-nau, iau, ain-ya-k ; for the plural, hi-da, ki-to, a-kity ; possessive forms are tio-ku, otea, u-ja. The Tukiok forms iau, io, yo ; da-ra, da-tul, dat, correspond mainly with the Fijian, and are all from the root da, ta.

I think that I have thus pi'oved that our Australian base ta is not local, but sporadic, and that, so far as this evidence has any weight, the brown Polynesians have something in common with the Melanesian race.

My next inquiry is this — Has this base, ta, da, ad, any connec- tion with the other race-languages 1 And at once I remember that the old Persian for ' I ' is ad-am, and this corresponds with the Sanskrit ah-am, of which the stem is agli-, as seen in the Grseco-Latin ego and the Germanic ich. I assume an earlier form of this base to have been ak-, but, whether this Indian ak- orthe Iranian ad- is the older, I cannot say. At all events, the change of ak into at and then into ad, and conversely, is a com- mon phonetic change, and is at this moment going on copiously in Polynesia. The ak is now in present use in the Malay aku, ' I.'

take to be for gu-mba, the gu being the possessive formative in Wiradhari ; it corresponds to the Ebudan ki, which is used in the same way.
 * The possessive termination for persons in Awabakal is -umba; tliis I

•\Cf. Singular, Dual, and (all else) Plural.

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