Page:An Australian language as spoken by the Awabakal.djvu/65

 INTEODrCTlOIS". Iv

gender by change of termination — are quite as common in Australian as they are in English. To this extent, therefore, the Australian dialects are sex-denoting.

The -ban in makoro-ban seems to be a masculine suffix ; in the Minyung dialect, yerrubil is ' a song,' yerrubil-gin, 'a singer,' and yerrubil-gin-gun is a 'songstress.' The AViradhari -dain in birbal-dain, 'a baker,' from birbara, ' to bake,' and in many other words, is also a masculine termination.

5. As to Number of nouns and pronouns, the same word, and the same form of it, does duty both as singular and plural ; the context shows which is meant ; e.g., kuri is ' a (native) man,' but kuri is also 'men'; if the speaker wishes to eay, '« man came home,' that would be wakal kiiri, 'one man' — the numeral being used just in the same way as our Saxon ' an,' ' ane ' — but 'the men' would be bara kuri, ' they-man,' not kuri bara, as the Aryan arrangement of the words would be. Hence the pronoun ngaddu, ngadlu may mean either 'I' or ' we'; to mark the number some pluralising word must be added to nouns and pronouns, such as iu the gala-ta, 'we,' of Western Australia, where the gala is equivalent to 'they,' or perhaps 'all.' In Wiradhari, galang is added on to form plurals. Nevertheless, there are, among the pronouns, terminations which appear to be plural forms, as, nge-an-ni, 'we,' nu-ra, 'you,' which I have already considered iu the section on the Australian pronouns.

The declension of y ago, ' a woman ' (page 49 of Appendix), is an example of a termination added on to form the plural uf a uoun, and shows how much akin our Australian language is to the Dravidian and other branches of the Turanian family. Yago takes -man as a plural ending, and to that affixes the signs of case which are used for the singular number. As a parallel, I cite the Turanian of Hungary; there, ur is ' master,' ur-am is 'my master,' ur-aim, 'my masters,' ur-am-nak, ' to my master,' ur-aim-nak, ' to my masters.' The Dravidian has not, in general, post-fixed possessives, but our Narrinyeri dialect has them, and they are quite common in the Papuan and Ebudan languages. In Fijian, the possessives, with nouns of relationship or members of the body or parts of a thing, are always post-fixed. And in Dravidian, when a noun denotes a rational being, the pronominal termination is suffixed.

6. The Minyung dialect (page 4, Appendix) makes a distinc- tion between life-nouns and uon-life nouns, and varies the end- ings of its adjectives accordingly. iSomething similar exists in Dravidian ; for it has special forms for epicene plurals and for rational plurals and for neuter plurals ; and, of course, in the classic languages the a of the neuter plural is distinctive. But in Eijian, the Minyung principle is carried out more fully, for possessives vary their radical form according as the nouns to

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