THE WOMBAT. 7Q 



I should say that the pronoun of the first person in 

 Woddowro and in Waworong (the Yarra dialect) are synony- 

 mous compounds with the radical word different, but with 

 the suffixed word the same : each dialect preserves in the 

 pronoun I its favoured term for body, the element ik or eek 

 being a demonstrative common to both. 



In Woddowro we get the suffix in both forms : Bang/£, 

 I ; Banggf/-, I. 



But if the pronominal banc/ is not identical with, and 

 does not mean iudy, we know it must be a word expressive of 

 some general notion applicable to /, thou, he, we, you, they ; 

 and in view of this and the foregoing facts, one may hold, and 

 reasonably until the contrary be proved, that the noun body is 

 the word we find in Woddowro pressed into pronominal service. 



It may possibly be a mere coincidence that the same 

 material, the word bang, was hit upon to express the pronoun 

 1 I ' by the Awabakal, at Lake Macquarie, and by the 

 Woddowro, at Corio Bay, yet as a lexical and* grammatical 

 agreement may be traced in the dialects of E. Australia, it is 

 not unreasonable to regard the Awabakal word as a sporadic 

 example radically the same as the Woddowro. Both dialects 

 seem to show bid, the supposed root syllable of the Australian 

 numeral ' two,' in the dual forms of their personal pronouns. 

 Awabakal, Bul-un, you. Woddowro, Bul-en, you. 



The Terminal Suffixes Ik and Etuk. 



I will now offer a few remarks about two more com- 

 ponents of the Woddowro compounds, viz. ik and etuk. Ik 

 takes its place in the pronouns independent of person, case, 

 and to this degree as to number. In the trinal examples, as 

 already pointed out, it occurs in all the forms : in the 

 singular it sometimes means ' I', and sometimes 'me.' But 

 neither Ik nor Etuk seems to be a suffix expressive of only 

 pronominal relationship, if that is the function Of both in the 

 compounds. In bangik, body, amajaik, white man, moondik, 

 young woman, boorp-boorp-kal-ik, children, warreip-kallik, 

 sons, the component He perhaps serves as a nounal suffix. 

 Etuk is the common Woddowro termination to the names of 

 parts of the human body : mhgnetuk, eye ; kaung-etuk, nose ; 

 &c. Very probably we also have a variant of it in bangondedook, 

 black man. Thus both ih and etuk seem to be nounal as well 

 as pronominal suffixes. * 



*•' Many American tongues, notably Algonquin and Iroquois, do not 

 distinguish the verb from the noun, the verb being nothing but a noun 

 accompanied by suffixes denoting possession. This seems to us somewhat 

 tin' case with the agglutinating languages generally, and we have shown how 

 the Dravidian verb may take nominal suffixes, just as the noun itself is 

 declined by means of pronominal suffixes." Abel Hovelacque, " The 

 Science of Language" p.p. 132-3. London, 1877. 



