ro THE SPEECH OF THE TASMANIAN ABORIGINES. 



distinguished for the precision of its rhythm, and the 

 second is perhaps an imitation, not of a Highland bag- 



•pipe, as Bonwick opined, but of the melody of a native 

 magpie, which most unmelodionsly the zoologists call a 



. ■" piping crow." 



II.— PHONOLOGY AND SEMASIOLOGY. 



H. Ling Roth, in his " Aborigines of Tasmania/' 

 tabulates some 3,000 words of their language. As I 

 have stated before, his lists are fairly accurate copies of 

 the original sources of his information, and may safely * 

 be used as a basis for our detailed investigation. We 

 shall take our examples chiefly from the Appendix. The 

 original recorders endeavoured to write phonetically. 

 Thus we find on the one hand a considerable variety in 

 the spelling of the same Aboriginal words, and, on the 

 'Other hand, this variety itself enables us to fix the actual 

 ■sound, because there is in most cases only one group of 

 sounds than can be phonetically represented by all the 

 varieties of the spelling. 



But here we meet with a phenomenon which seems 

 to present an insuperable obstacle, and yet contains the 

 Icey to a plausible solution of the whole question ; for we 

 find in words of the same dialect such similarity as 

 argues an identity of meaning, and such dififereinces as 

 are in other languages found as distinguishing charac- 

 teristics of different dialects. We may assume words 

 to be of the same dialect, if they appear in the vocabulary 

 of a recorder who did not meet with more than one 

 tribe of Aborigines, or who had sufficient knowledge of 

 different tribes to be able to assign .each word to its 

 proper origin. Ataong the former are chiefly the navi- 

 gators, e.g., Cook, Peron, and La Billardiere; among 

 the latter we may mention Norman, Jorgensen, and 

 Milligan. 



Now, these quasi-identical words might have come 

 from different tribes, and thus have formed a composite 

 vocabulary, especially as we find, on comparing the 

 various dialects, that they evidently are species of the 

 same generic language. But we read in H. Ling Roth's 



