BY HERMANN B. RITZ, M.A. 



55: 



number of words. Of course, any particular thing could 

 not be denoted by their words except by the aid of 

 gestures and convention, as in the names of persons and 

 places. And this explains why the dialects were appa- 

 rently foreign to each other. What would in one tribe 

 be named after its speed, would in another take its name 

 from its habit or size. Indeed, I am inclined to hold, 

 against the current theory that the Tasmanians had nO' 

 generic names, that they had no speciiic Avords, even 

 the proper nouns being made up of generic constituents. 



In the ■examples given so far, we observed chiefly 

 the first consonant, with the following vowel wdiic'h 

 made it audible, and took no heed of anything that came 

 after these. 



The vowels were, as has already been pointed out, 

 so unstable as to be of no importance for our demon- 

 stration. 



We will now proceed a step further, by adding 

 another consonant to the syllable, with or without 

 another vowel, as may be found convenient. 



From the four primitive words we derive twelve 

 secondary terms, three from each. It is evident, from 

 what has been shown, that if the second consonant is 

 of the same class as the first, the result is merely a 

 strengthening of the first, by repetition. For instance, 

 lala, ant, is the swift runner ; lane, to strike, flog, look, 

 is repeated or forcible motion towards some object; 

 mamana, tongue, is the repeatedly moving pointed 

 member; nala, manana, earth, the movable part of the 

 surface of the ground ; nama, white man, the rover who 

 has no tribe to stay with ; nami, a stone than can be 

 rolled or carried or thrown ; ralla, frog, the swimming 

 and hopping thing, also energetic, full of movement; 

 rene, run ; rilia, fingers, movable limbs. 



The first syllables uttered by an infant are naturally 

 pa, ba, ma, and later, na, etc. Hence we have in most 

 languages words like baby, mama, papa, nana. In Tas- 

 manian, too, we have pawe, paAvawe, little child ; nina 

 mina, (my) mother, father. 



W^e must be careful to avoid mistaking- the n of the 

 nominal sufifix na for the final consonant of the previous 

 syllable, or vice versa. 



