SOME REMARKS ON THE AUSTRALIAN LANGUAGES. 233 



that in the Anthropological Journal for 1880, on the "Kabi dialect 

 of Queensland," by the Rev. John Matthew, now of Coburg, Vic- 

 toria. The substance of this, with many important additions, will 

 be found as a portion of his prize essay on the aborigines of Aus- 

 tralia, published in the Journal of the Royal Society, N.S.W., for 

 last year. So far the history of the grammars. 



2. Influences affecting the Language. 



The position of our Australian dialects in their relation to the 

 great families of language has not yet been determined. That 

 task demands leisure, labour, and skill. A collection of carefully 

 prepared Grammars and Vocabularies would make the task much 

 easier ; but where are these to be had ? With the exception of 

 those that I have named, I know of none. Australian Vocabu- 

 laries have been collected in abundance, but, for the most part, 

 these are quite useless to the philologist ; they consist of dialect- 

 names for native customs and weapons, for the birds of the air, 

 the beasts of the field, and the trees of the forest.* All this is mis- 

 taken labour which yields no fruit. What we want is to get from 

 each dialect a sufficient number of words expressing the ideas 

 essential to a language, in the form of substantive, adjective, or 

 verb, and a sufficient number of simple sentences • this would enable 

 the philologist to ascertain what is the structure of its grammar 

 and its vocables. 



The Australian languages are subject to a principle of change 

 which it is worth our pains to consider here. Our native tribes 

 name their children from any ordinary occurrence, which may 

 have taken place at the birth or soon after it. For instance, if 

 a kangaroo-rat were seen to run into a hollow log at that time, 

 the child would be named by some modification of the word for 

 kangaroo-rat. At a later period of the boy's life, that name might 

 be changed for another, taken from some trivial circumstance in his 

 experience ; just as our own boys get by-names at school. When a 

 man or a woman dies, his family and the other members of the 



* I wish here to express my strong regret that, in two of the largest 

 publications which these colonies have produced, on the subject of our 

 aborigines, so much space has been given to mere local names, such as 

 those for the mountains, lagoons, animals, and birds in a district. Such 

 details are absolutely valueless to the philologist. In a general investi- 

 gation as to the character of the Australian language, no help is to be 

 gained from a bare knowledge of the names for all the Frying Pan Creeks 

 and Doughboy Hollows in the land, or for the scores of varieties of the 

 eucalyptus tree. Instead of these, let us have the words essential to the 

 language, ' to see,' ' hear/ ' speak,' ' smite or kill,' and the like, and, with 

 them, samples of the manner in which they form derivatives ,- let us also 

 have similar lists of root-words used as substantives and adjectives to 

 express simple ideas ; such collections would be useful both now and 

 hereafter. 



