12 ABORIGINAL LANGUAGES, ETC. 



large part of New South Wales, house or camp is given by wullai, 

 wurrai, or wuttai, as 1, r, and t can be used as substitutes for 

 each other. 



In the Wirrai languages west of the Great Dividing 

 Range of New South Wales ngurumba is used for camp and 

 house. 



It ought to be supposed that words for father and mother 

 would be the same in all the East Australian dialects, but this 

 is not the case. In nearly all the Indo- Germanic languages the 

 word for father is derived from a root pa, which coincides with 

 the root pa, " to protect." The word for mother is derived from 

 a root ma, which coincides with the root ma, " to produce." 

 Now it is a strange fact that similar words for father and mother 

 occur in different parts of the globe. Whereas in the 

 most of the aboriginal dialects of Queensland the word father is 

 given by " bing," or " beong," or " buna " (Dawson River); still 

 there exist synonyms for it, like " boba " in the Wakar language 

 on the Upper Brisbane, " buba"in the Yaggara of the Lower 

 Brisbane, "babun" or "bobin" in the Karbi, on the Burnett. 

 In the Wirrai dialect on the Murrumbidgee, the general 

 rule is reversed. Father is called " mamma," mother, " papa." 

 As all these words cannot be derived from Sanskrit roots meaning 

 " to protect " and " to produce," it is evident that pa and ma 

 are only to be considered as the first efforts of the infantile 

 human race, to use the organs of speech in connection with the 

 nearest and most beloved objects of childhood. 



As already mentioned, the languages of all Eastern Aus- 

 tralia belong to one and the same rootstock. With a very few 

 exceptions the negative is derived from the same word, still 

 preserved in the northern languages, namely, " Kara " or " Kura," 

 which means "No." The exceptions refer to languages belonging 

 to another rootstock, put between " Kura" languages by migra- 

 ting tribes from the west, like the Koi language west of Tenterfield 

 and Glen Innes, where the foot is called " winnier," and like the 

 Beall language around Sydney, which died out long ago, and 

 where the foot was called "manoe." Pure Kura or Kara is 

 spoken by the Goa tribe, and the other tribes in the district of 

 Gregory North, on the sources of the Diamantina River, in the 

 southern and eastern parts of the Mitchell district, and also in 



