Page:An Australian language as spoken by the Awabakal.djvu/63

 iNTRODUCTiox. liii

X. G-EAMMATICAL FoEMS AND SxNTAX,

The consideration of the grammatical forms and the syntax of a language, is a very important part of comparative grammar, and is a more potent proof of identity of origin than mere words can be ; for, while words may be abnndantly introduced from abroad, as the history of our English language testifies, yet the essential structure of allied languages is as little liable to change as the cranial character of a race, As none of the dialects spoken in Australia has had the chance of becoming fixed by being reduced to writing, the materials available for comparing them with themselves and with other languages are in a state of flux and decay, and any effort to determine their grammar will be only provisioDal at present, and subject to errors arising from the imperfect state of our information about them. Nevertheless, allowance being made for this source of imperfection and error, several of their features may be regarded as well- determined ; and it will here be convenient to arrange these in numbered paragraphs.

1. The Australian languages are in the agglutinative stage ; the relations which words and ideas bear to each other in a sentence are shown by independent words, often monosyllables, Avhich do not lose their identity when attached to the word which they thus qualify. Por example, 'he is the son of a good (native) man,' in Awabakal, is noa yinal mararag ko ba kuri ko ba, where the monosyllables ko and ba express the relation of yinal to kiiri, and are otherwise in common use as distinct words; they can be combined and fastened on to kiiri so that the whole may be pronounced as one word, kurikoba, but they do not thus become lost as case-endings. These particles ko-ba, when thus united, may be also treated as an independent word, even as a verb, for koba-toara is a verbal form, meaning 'a thing that is in possession, gotten, acquired.'

Similarly, the tenses of the verb are indicated by particles added on to the stem; as, bum-mara-bun-bill-ai-koa bag, 'that I may permit the one to be struck by the other'; here bun is the root-form, 'strike,' which may be almost any part of speech; ma- ra is an independent stem meaning 'make' (ma); biin is another verb conveying the idea of ' permission ' ; it is not used as a separate word, but it appears to be only a derived form of the verb ba, (ma), ' to make,' 'to let'; the rest of our sample word is bill-ai-koa; of these, koa is a lengthened form of the preposition ko, ' to,' and is equivalent to the Latin conjunction ut; the -ai has a reciprocal force, andb-illi is the same forma- tive which we found in ta-killi-ko, q.v. Thus our sample-word is made up of three verbs, a formative (illi), which, perhaps, is of the nature of a demonstrative, a particle, and the infinitive post-position, which, as to its origin, may have been a verb.

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