Page:An Australian language as spoken by the Awabakal.djvu/62

 lii I51R0DUCTI0IC.

use, the Latin supine in -turn. This Sanskrit -turn is the accusa- tive of the sufhx -tu to express agency, and may thus corres])ond with our AustraHan suffix -to, -du, "which is used in a similar manner. In the Diyeri dialect*, the infinitive ends in m i, which means 'to'; in Aneityumcse imi means 'to.' Now, in all the Dra vidian dialects, the sign of the dative case is ku, ki, ge; in Hindi it is ko, in Bengali ke ; other forms in India are khe, -ghai, -gai; with this -gai compare the MiiTV'ung dative in -gai*. In the Kota dialect of the Dravidian, the dative sign is ke, and the locative is -ol-ge; the infinitive ends in -alik, probably a compound of ali and ke ; the Aneityumeso infinitive in -aliek is very like that. A close parallel to our Awabakal infinitive in -k o is the Dravidian infinitive in -gu ; as, kuru, 'short,' kuru-gu, 'to diminish.' In the Malay languages, tran- sitive verbs are formed by prefixes and affixes ; of the latter, the most common is kan, which may be the preposition ka, 'to.'

In the Ebudan languages, ki is a genitive and a dative sign, and in one of them, Malekulan, bi, ' to,' makes an infinitive (cf. the South Australian mi), and this same bi is used like the Latin ut, ' in order that '; with this compare the Awabakal koa (page 75, et al.) — a lengthened form of -ko. In Fijian, some transitive verbs take ki, 'to,' after them, but a common termination for the infini- tive is -ka, and the 'i (sometimes ' o) of many verbs in Samoan may be the same termination.

Our infinitive denotes the ' end ' or ' purpose ' for which any- thing is done ; hence the dative sign ; so also in Sanskrit, it would be correct to use the dative in -ana of the verbal noun. In the "VViradhari dialect, -ana is a very common termination for in- finitives ; but I do not know that it has any relation to the Sanskrit -ana.

I have taken this verb takilliko as an example of the form- ation of an infinitive in Awabakal ; all other infinitives in that dialect are formed in the same way; the variations -ulli-ko, olli-ko, elli-ko proceed from -alii, which I would write -alii, so as to include the vowel changes all in one sign. In other dialects, there are many other forms for the infinitive, but this one in -illi is not confined to the Kuriggai tribe, but is found also in Victoria.

Another similar and very important "\'erb in the Awabakal is kakilliko, the vei'b 'to be.' On the same principles, as shown above, the -killiko here is terminational and the root is ka. Here again the Dravidian dialects assist us to trace the word ; for the Tamil has iVgu, 'to become,' the Telugu has kii, the Canarese agal, and the Gond a3^-a,le. Our Wiradhari dialect says ginya (for gi-ga), 'to become.' It is possible that these forms have a parallel, but independent, relation to the Sanskiit roots gan and ga, 'to come into being,' Greek gigno-mai, gino-mai.


 * See pp. 13 and 45 of Appendix.

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