THE THURRAWAL LANGUAGE. 127 



THE THURRAWAL LANGUAGE. 



By R. H. Mathews, l.s., Corres. Memb. Anthrop. Soc, 



Washington, U.S.A. 



[Read before the Royal Society of N. S. Wales, November 6, 1901. .] 



The Thurrawal speaking people were formerly spread over the 

 south-east coast of New South Wales from Port Hacking to Jervis 

 Bay, and extended inland for a considerable distance. For some 

 years past I have studied the Thurrawal tongue, and now submit 

 the grammatical outlines of its structure. Considerations of space 

 render it necessary to touch only upon the fundamental elements 

 of the language. 



I have discovered that many of the nouns, adjectives, prepo- 

 sitions and adverbs — in addition to the verbs and pronouns — are 

 inflected for number and person. This fact has not hitherto been 

 reported, to my knowledge, in any part of Australia, although to 

 some extent observed in certain islands of the Pacific Ocean. 



In verbs, pronouns, and other parts of speech subject to con- 

 jugation and inflection, there is a double form of the first person 

 of the dual and plural, which has also been observed in Polynesia, 

 and among the Amarinds of North America. Two forms of the 

 •dual were noticed by Rev. L. E. Threlkeld among the aborigines 

 •of Lake Macquarie, New South Wales, but he says this did not 

 extend to the plural. 1 



This paper claims to enlarge, in some degree, the circle of 

 Australian ethnology. Exhibiting the general structure of any 

 native tongue must be valuable to philologists, in enabling them 

 to compare our aboriginal languages with each other, and also 

 with those of the people of Polynesia and the East Indian Archi- 

 pelago, whence the primitive inhabitants of this Continent are 



1 An Australian Language (Sydney), pp. 17 and 91. 



