244 JOHN PHASER. 



same word as the Malay inula already referred to, and both of 

 these I take from the Sanskrit root- verb bhii, 'to begin to be, to 

 become, to be,' with which is connected the Latin fore (fuere), 

 ' to be about to be,' f ui, &c. From bhii come such Sanskrit words 

 as bhava, 'birth, origin,' bhavana, ' causing to be,' bhuvanyu, 

 'a master or lord ' (cf. piran, etc.), and many other words in the 

 Aryan languages. At all events, wakul and these other Austra- 

 lian words for ' one ' are assuredly from the same root as the 

 Dravidian mu-dal, 'first, a beginning.' I, for one, cannot believe 

 that words so much alike both in root and meaning should have 

 sprung up by accident over so vast an area as India, Malaya, New 

 Guinea, Fiji, Samoa, and back again to the New Hebrides and 

 Australia. The only rational explanation seems to me to be that 

 these races were all at one time part of a common stock, that 

 in their dispersion they carried with them the root-words of the 

 parent languages, and that in their new habitations they dressed 

 out these root-words with prefixes and affixes by a process of 

 development, just as circumstances required. 



Results. — The root in its simplest form is ba, ' to begin to be/ 

 ' to begin '; other forms are bo, bu, bi: ma, mo, mu ; fa, fu, vu; 

 wa. The nearest approach to the Australian wakul, 'one,' is the 

 Ebudan bokol, 'one,' and the Tukiok makal-a, 'for the first time, 7 

 but many other cognate words are found all over the South Seas 

 in the sense of 'first,' 'begin.' The Tasmanian mara-wa, 'one/ 

 is the same as the Tukiok mara, 'for the first time,' and mara, 

 100; and in New South Wales, mara-gai means 'first' in the 

 Mudgee dialect. 



5. The numeral ' two.' 



Almost the only other Australian numeral is bula 'two.' It is 

 true that several tribes have a distinct word for ' three,' and a few 

 have a word for ' five ' taken from the word ' hand,' but in most 

 parts of Australia the number ' three ' is expressed by ' two-one,' 

 ' four ' by 'two-two,' ' five ' by ' two-two-one ' and so on. But the 

 word bula is universal ; with various changes of termination,* it 



* Note — In my manuscript notes I have the following- forms : — Tas- 

 mania, bura, pooali, piawah; Victoria, bulum, pollit; South Aus- 

 tralia, bulait, purlaitye ; New South Wales, blula, buloara, bulo- 

 ara-ba; Southern Queensland, bular, piibul, bularre, bulae; Nor- 

 thern Queensland, bularoo. It is evident that s^me of these words have 

 been written down by men who were not acquainted with the phonology 

 of languages, and that the spelling does not adequately represent the real 

 sounds. This is generally the case in vocabularies of Australian words, 

 and is a source of much perplexity to linguists. One of the commonest 

 mistakes is bular for bula. In pronouncing that word our blackfellows 

 let the voice dwell on the final a, and an observer is apt to think that this 



