Page:The Aborigines of Victoria and Riverina.djvu/177

172 diversity of tongues, with which the philologist who undertakes the task of reducing the language of the Australian aborigines to rule has to deal; in fact, he will see at once that such a project is not in the remotest feature feasible.

Were the terms meaning the same things in the various tribes traceable to common roots, then, of course, the difficulty would be surmounted easily enough; but as this is not the case in any instance, the enquirer is at a loss to know from whence the words proceed, which go to the formation of the numerous dialects, or in what manner they were originally constructed.

To show how very dissimilar the dialects are, we give below a few examples taken from two of the Murray River tribes, which join, the territory of neither having a longer frontage to that river than forty miles.

For the information of the reader we hear state that in all cases the negative of the dialect spoken is the name of the tribe which speaks it; or, in other words, the name of the tribe is the negative of the dialect, repeated twice.

These examples, though few, are (we imagine) ample enough to show how very unlike these dialects are; and the same dissimilarity holds good throughout the dialects of the whole race. Thus, therefore, one glance will suffice to show that it would be both fallacious and absurd in the extreme