A Grammar and Vocabulary of the Language 



SPOKEN BY THE ABORIGINES OF THE MagDoN- 



NELL Ranges, South Australia. 



By the Rev. H. Kempe, of the Mission Station, River Finke, 

 Corr. Memb. 



[Read December 2, 1890.] 



PREFACE. 



The result of an attempt to analyse a language of which the 

 people speaking it have only a colloquial knowledge, and who are 

 consequently incapable of answering or even understanding gram- 

 matical questions, must be in many respects imperfect. The 

 difficulty is increased by the wandering habits of the jDeople, 

 making it impossible to maintain that constant communication 

 with them which is necessary for the attainment of a complete 

 knowledge of the structure of their language. It is only with 

 the help of the boys grown up on the station, and who have 

 become less nomadic than their elders, that the knowledge 

 now gained has been established. There still remain mysterious 

 phrases, incapable as yet of being traced back to their origin, 

 awaiting solution. The following pages, therefore, do not profess 

 to contain a complete vocabulary, nor one which would satisfy 

 the learned philologist. Even up to the present day expressions 

 crop up for things it was thought the natis^es had no words. The 

 difficulty is increased by the close proximity of another tribe, for 

 south of the Finke the natives speak a different language alto- 

 gether, as their words terminate in i and ?* and cm, whilst the 

 others terminate all in a. As they have frequent intercourse 

 with each other, it is very easy to understand that the natives to 

 the north must have adopted many of the words and phrases of 

 tliose to the south. 



Concerning the vocal^ulary, it may be mentioned that it has 

 been carefully compiled and revised several times with different 

 natives, so that the words may be relied upon as correct. 



These pages are submitted in the hope that they will prove 

 interesting to the philologist, as exhibiting the peculiar structure 

 of the language spoken by a people generally considered among 

 the lowest in the scale of mankind, and will contribute a little 

 towards perpetuating the knowledge of a language of one of the 

 Australian tril^es of natives before their probable entire extinc- 

 tion at a no very i-emote period. 



The vocabulary is that of the tribe inhabiting the River Finke, 



