48 



THE SPEECH OF THE TASMANIAN ABORIGINES. 



English-speaking travellers tliat they endeavour to im- 

 press their meaning on the " foreign "' natives by speak- 

 ing very loudly and distinctly, and by using what has 

 been called " jingalese " syntax, after the style of Mr. 

 Alfred Jingle, which consists in uttering a series of 

 names of things and actions without any attempt at con- 

 necting them. 



Now, this is precisely the style of the Aboriginal 

 speech, and the similarity of the two styles on the one 

 hand confirms the conjecture that the Aboriginal style 

 was a primitive, infantile method of conveying thought, 

 and, on the other hand, it helps tO' explain the fact that 

 English in its " pidgin " or " business " form is so easily 

 acquired by foreigners. 



In my interpretation of the Popela Song (Papers of 

 the Royal Society of Tasmania, 1908), I had occasion to 

 give some examples of this style of speaking, and we 

 shall consider some further illustrations in due course. 



For the present, we shall discuss only one point 

 more, namely, the intonation of the Aboriginal speech,, 

 as regards word accent and phrase modulation. The 

 records do not always indicate the word-accent, and 

 when they do, they often vary. Two methods of indi- 

 cating the accented syllable are used, viz., that of doub- 

 ling the consonant after the accented vowel, and that of 

 putting a small horizontal stroke over that vowel ; and 

 these methods are employed with sufficient frequency 

 to allow of definite conclusions on the matter. 



As an interesting illustration we may take the word 

 for " bullock "or " beef," quoted by H. Ling Roth from 

 Jorgensen's vocabulary (p. 182). Jorgensen says, inter 

 alia, that buckelow or iDacala, " bullock," is from the 

 English, probably because there were no native bul- 

 locks. The English word " bullock " would be changed 

 by metathesis into " buckle," and lengthened by the 

 usual epithetic vowel into " buckla," or something like 

 it. It is evident that the word accent rests on the first 

 syllable. But Norman in his vocabulary (L.R., p. i) 

 gives the word as parka liar. Now, in this vocabulary, 

 we must eliminate the majority of the r's, as merely 

 phonetic devices ; thus we get pak 11a, where the accent 

 is not only marked by the stroke above the second a,. 

 but also by the doubling of the 1 following it. 



