The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Gundungurra Language, by R. H. Mathews

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: The Gundungurra Language

Author: R. H. Mathews

Release Date: June 19, 2007 [EBook #21866]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GUNDUNGURRA LANGUAGE ***

Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer

[Transcriber's Note: In this version, the following replacements were
made: a with macron is [a|], a with circumflex is [a^], i with macron
is [i|], o with circumflex is [o^], and n with tilde is [n~].]

THE GUNDUNGURRA LANGUAGE.

BY R. H. MATHEWS, L.S.

(_Read October 4, 1901._)

The Dhar'rook and Gun'dungur'ra tribes respectively occupied the
from the mouth of the Hawkesbury river to Mount Victoria, and thence
southerly to Berrima and Goulburn, New South Wales. On the south and
southeast they were joined by the Thurrawal, whose language has the
same structure, although differing in vocabulary.

Besides the verbs and pronouns, many of the nouns, adjectives,
prepositions and adverbs are subject to inflection for number and
person. Similar inflections have, to some extent, been observed in
certain islands of the Pacific Ocean, but have not hitherto been
reported in Australia. I have also discovered two forms of the dual
and plural of the first personal pronoun, a specialty which has
likewise been found in Polynesian and North American dialects. Traces
of a double dual were noticed by Mr. Threlkeld at Lake Macquarie, New
South Wales, and traces of a double plural by Mr. Tuckfield in the
Geelong tribe; but the prevalence of both forms of the dual and plural
in different parts of speech in any Australian language has, up to the
present, escaped observation.

Orthography.

Ninteen letters of the English alphabet are sounded, comprising
fourteen consonants--b, d, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, r, t, w, y--and
five vowels--a, e, i, o, u. Every word is spelled phonetically, the
letters having the same value as in English, with the following
qualifications:

Unmarked vowels have the usual short sound.

Vowels having the long sound are distinguished by the following marks:

[a|] as in fate [i|] as in pie oo as in moo