le. Possibly this factor,
together with ordinary laws of phonetic change, the most elementary
principles of which have yet to be established for the Australian
languages, will suffice to account for the variations in the names as
recorded. Otherwise the words are in most cases reduced to monosyllabic
roots from which it seems hopeless to attempt to extract a meaning.

These questions of suffixes and prefixes are intimately connected with
the very difficult problem of the origin of the classes. The languages
of these tribes are at present, if not distinct linguistic stocks, at
any rate very far from being mere dialectical variations of a common
tongue, for the members of two tribes appear to be mutually
unintelligible, unless, contrary to the custom of the American Indians,
they are bilingual. But if each tribe added a suffix, and thus adopted
into their own language words which, from the general agreement among
the class names of this group, seem to have come to them from outside,
it is a reasonable hypothesis that the word which they adopted had some
meaning for them. Of course we may suppose that the class names were all
adopted in the far off time when all spoke a common language. But apart
from the difficulty that this presupposes the existence of an
eight-class system at that early period, it is clear from the Queensland
evidence that class names have been handed on from tribe to tribe, and
it is reasonable to suppose this to have been the case with the northern
tribes. This conclusion is borne out by the forms of the suffixes, which
do not appear to have been developed from one root determinative, as
must have been the case if we suppose that the names originated when the
language spoken by these tribes was undifferentiated; and by the facts
as to the apparent duplication of Koomara, to which allusion has already
been made.

The important point about the class, as distinguished from the phratry
systems, is the great extent covered by the former. The north-west area
of male descent is virtually one from the point of view of class names;
two other areas are very large, six are of medium size, three are small,
and the remaining one is probably medium.

Although the question of the meaning of the class names is closely bound
up with that of their origin, the problem is closely bound up with some
of the points discussed in this chapter. The meaning of the eight-class
names is connected with the area of origin of the