6 THE WOMBAT. 
THE WODDOWRO PRONOUNS. 
By Jonw Fraser, LL.D., Sypyey. 
In December, 1897, I got a letter from Mr. John J. Cary, of 
Geelong, stating that he had discovered in a tribal language of 
Australia the existence of both a dual and a triple number for the 
pronouns, and asking my opinion on the examples which he sent. 
‘At that time I was busy organising Section F (Anthropology) of 
the Science meeting which was held in Sydney the month after, 
and so had not leisure to examine his examples carefully, but I 
wrote an opinion as follows, which he afterwards printed. 
«An Opinion BY Dr. FRASER. 
(1) “* There onght to be no difficulty in accepting Prof. 
Tucker’s suggestion that these dual and ternal (i.e, triple or 
trinal) examples contain the Australian numerals bul-a, ‘ two,’ and 
gul-i-ba, ‘ three,’ for several islands of the New Hebrides occupied 
by Melanesians akin to our Australian blacks have the numerals 
‘two? and ‘three’ incorporated in the dual and ternai forms of 
their personal pronouns, and the Samoans of Polynesia and the 
Papuan natives of the south coast of New Guinea have also their 
word for ‘ two’ in their dual pronouns. 
2) “If we admit bula and guldba, then your examples 
should read—Dnai: bang-(b)ul, bang-bul-ok, bang-a-bul-ong ; 
bang-go-de-(b)ul, bang-go-de-bul-ok, bang-go-de-bulok. (I think 
this last example must be wrong, for ‘ yours ? and ‘theirs’ cannot 
be expressed by the same form.) Ternal : bang-etuk-gul-ik, &c. 
(8) ‘I do not think that bang-ik of your examples can be 
the same word as bang, ‘I,’ of Lake Macquarie, for your bang 
occurs in all the forms quoted, and it seems to me impossible that 
a word meaning ‘1’ should be part of a pronoun ‘thou ? or ‘he’ 
or ‘you’ (plural). In human speech, ‘he,’ for instance, is a 
simple demonstrative, meaning ‘ that’ or ‘ this one,’ 1.¢., someone 
distinct from the speaker, and so the word for ‘I’ could not be a 
part of it. 
(4) “ But I think it probable that, in the sentence from which 
you quote, the bang is a verb or a verbal noun (perhaps meaning 
‘be,’ or ‘ strike,’ or. ?), and that the terminations which follow 
oe eee a — — 
—_ ——— —T ' _ ‘ 
ee en ea 
_— 
Ya 
_ 
