74 THE ABORIGINAL SPEECH OF TASMANIA. 



Ling Roth has evidently made use of ah these 

 sources of information, and embodied the result of his 

 researches in his book ; but though very valuable for its 

 suggestiveness, his work is not that of a trained philolo- 

 gist, and it will be necessary to verify and re-examine 

 his references. 



In Appendix F, he states : — " As all the vocabularies 

 handed down to us are English-Tasmanian, and none 

 are Tasmanian-English, it was suggested to make a 

 compilation of one Tasmanian-Englis'h vocabulary from 

 all the vocabularies. The initiative is due to Mrs. E. B. 

 Tylor. In preparing this vocabulary, I have attempted 

 to simplify the spelling as follows, where I have felt that 

 I could safely do so without impairing the integrity of 

 the word." 



Then follow the phonetic letters proposed to be em- 

 ployed. They are, as far as the vowels are concerned, 

 analogous to the Italian " u," " i," " e," " ia." " C 

 guttural " is to be written as " k." No other letters are 

 mentioned. Duplicated consonants are simplified, and 

 " th," " ch " are to be left unchanged, being doubtful. 



When we examine this Tasmanian-English vocabu- 

 lary W'C observe that — 



1. There are words in it not contained in the Eng- 

 lish-Tasmanian vocabularies given in the same book. 

 For instance, " abri," arm; " arpu," yes. It would seem 

 tihat Ling Roth used other vocabularies as well, or else 

 did not give the whole of the vocabularies he names ; or 

 permitted misprints to remain. He quotes " alree " for 

 " arm," from Dove's list. How is a reader to know 

 whether "alree" or "abri" is a misprint? At all 

 events, this work will have to be done over again. 



2. There are many Avords taken from the French 

 vocabularies, in which the French phonetic spelling is 

 retained, instead of being transliterated according to 

 Italian phonetics. 



In Appendix C we find Milligan's vocabulary of 

 various tribes. This, apart from some printer's errors, 

 is almost, but not quite, identical with that q-uoted by 

 Calder in the Parliamentary Paper wihich Sir Elliott 

 Lewis caused to be compiled in 1901. Here, again, veri- 

 fication is necessary. 



