BY HERMANN" B. RITZ, M.A. 



47 



First, however, we must briefly refer to the charac- 

 teristics of the records themselves. It is evident that 

 the original writers of these records had no special 

 training for this work. Many of them were men of con- 

 siderable scientific attainments, but there was no spe- 

 cialist in philology among them, and even if there had 

 been, the science of Phonology, indeed that of Com- 

 parative Philology itself, had not in their time emerged 

 from mere empiricism to the rudiments of stricth^ logical 

 treatment. 



Again, some of the recorders were French, one was 

 a Scandinavian, others were natives of different parts 

 of the United Kingdom, and each of these recorded what 

 he thought he heard and according to the way he tried 

 to imitate the Ta&manian words. When we add to these 

 causes of uncertainty the circumstances that ortho- 

 graphy was not always a point of excellence in those 

 days, we realise some of the difficulties attending our 

 examination of the records. Still, some of these difficul- 

 ties are not as great as one would expect. After all, the 

 spelling was to a certain extent phonetic, and by pro- 

 nouncing the Tasmanian words as if they were English, 

 'and comparing them with similar words of kindred 

 meaning, we soon learn to fix the actual sounds with 

 some certainty. 



There is yet another difficulty with those records. 

 When vocabularies and lists of phrases were beginning 

 to be compiled, the influence of the white invaders of 

 Tasmania had been active for about thirty years, and 

 had almost completely destroyed the original conditions 

 of the life of the Aborigines. The survivors had been 

 collected, and their various dialects had been mutilated, 

 •and amalgamated into a sort of " lingua franca " made 

 up of convenient native words and colloquial and tech- 

 nical English terms. Still, it is possible to pick out words 

 ■characteristic of certain dialects, just as we could deter- 

 mine the Attic, Ionic, Doric, and Aeolian forms from 

 ■a piece of Greek composition done by an ambitious 

 schoolboy. Nor is the admixture of English words of 

 serious consequence ; the words are chiefly the names 

 of things unconnected with the life of the Aborigines, 

 ;and, fortunately for our purpose, the native syntax was 

 not interfered with to any noticeable extent, owing to a 

 "very interesting circumstance. For it is peculiar to 



