nd no distinction of genders, if we except an attempt to mark one among
those tribes who give numerical names to their children, according to the
order of their birth, as before mentioned. [Note 96: Chap. IV.
nomenclature.] All parts of speech appear to be subject to inflections,
if we except adverbs, post-fixes, and post-positions. Nouns, adjectives,
pronouns and verbs have all three numbers, singular, dual and plural. The
nominative agent always precedes an active verb. When any new object
is presented to the native, a name is given to it, from some fancied
similarity to some object they already know, or from some peculiar
quality or attribute it may possess; thus, rice is in the Moorunde
dialect called "yeelilee" or "maggots," from an imagined resemblance
between the two objects.

[Note 95: Catlin remarks the existence of a similar number and variety in
the dialects of the American Indians, but appears to think them radically
different from one another.]

The most singular and remarkable fact, connected with the coincidence of
customs or dialect, amongst the Aborigines, is that it exists frequently
to a less degree among tribes living close to one another, than between
those who are more remotely separated. The reason of this apparent
anomaly would seem to be, that those tribes now living near to one
another, and among whom the greatest dissimilarity of language and
customs is found to exist, have originally found their way to the same
neighbourhood by different lines of route, and consequently the greatest
resemblances in language and custom, might naturally be expected to be
met with, (as is in reality the case), not between tribes at present the
nearest to each other, but between those, who although now so far
removed, occupy respectively the opposite extremes of the lines of route
by which one of them had in the first instance crossed over the
continent.

Without entering into an elaborate analysis, of either the structure or
radical derivation of the various dialects we are acquainted with, I
shall adduce a few instances in each, of words taken from the
vocabularies I have mentioned before, for King George's Sound, Adelaide,
Encounter Bay, and Port Lincoln, and supply them myself from other
dialects, including those meeting on the Murray or at the Darling, to
shew the degree of similarity that exists in language.

In selecting the examples for comparison, I have taken first the personal
pronouns and numerals