140 MATHEWS — THE GUNDUXGURRA LANGUAGE. [Oct. 4, 



William Ludlow, U.S.A., August 30, 1901, Washington. 

 Waldron Shapleigh, August 30, 1901, Philadelphia. 

 Pascual de Guyangos, October 4, 1897, London, Eng. 

 Papers were read as follows : 



" On Friedrich Nietzsche," by A. Radcliffe Grote. 

 u On the Gundungurra Language," by R. H. Mathews. 

 ' "Notes on Pure Circulating Decimals," by C. M. Fennell. 

 The Society was adjourned by the presiding officer. 



THE GUNDUNGURRA LANGUAGE. 



BY R. H, MATHEWS, L.S. 

 {Read October 4, 1901.) 



The Dhar'rook and Gun'dungur'ra tribes respectively occupied 

 the country from the mouth of the Hawkesbury river to Mount 

 Victoria, and thence southerly to Berrima and Goulburn, New 

 South Wales. On the south and southeast they were joined by the 

 Thurrawal, whose language has the same structure, although differ- 

 ing in vocabulary. 



Besides the verbs and pronouns, many of the nouns, adjectives, 

 prepositions and adverbs are subject to inflection for number and 

 person. Similar inflections have, to some extent, been observed in 

 certain islands of the Pacific Ocean, but have not hitherto been 

 reported in Australia. I have also discovered two forms of the 

 dual and plural of the first personal pronoun, a specialty which has 

 likewise been found in Polynesian and North American dialects. 

 Traces of a double dual were noticed by Mr. Threlkeld at Lake 

 Macquarie, New South Wales, and traces of a double plural by Mr. 

 Tuckfield in the Geelong tribe ; but the prevalence of both forms 

 of the dual and plural in different parts of speech in any Austra- 

 lian language has, up to the present, escaped observation. 



Orthography. 



Nineteen letters of the English alphabet are sounded, comprising 

 fourteen consonants — b, d, g, h, j, k, 1, m, n, p, r, t, w, y — and five 

 vowels — a, e, i, o, u. Every word is spelled phonetically, the letters 



