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Updated: May 15, 2025
This must prepare us for not expecting a greater amount of resemblance between the Australian personal pronouns than really exists. Beginning with the most inconstant of the three pronouns, namely, that of the third person, we find in the Kowrarega the following forms: 3. Singular, masculine : nu-du = he, him. Singular, feminine : na-du = she, her. Dual, common : pale = they two, them two.
Lastly, the Western Australian and the Kowrarega so closely agree in the use of the numeral two for the dual pronoun, that each applies it in the same manner. Singular : nga-tu = I, me. Dual : albei = we two, us two. Plural : arri = we, us. Here the plural and dual are represented not by a modification of the singular but by a new word; as different from nga as nos is from ego.
In the Liverpool dialect, bir-il = hand, and at King George Sound, peer = nails. The commonest root, = hand in the Australian dialects, is m-r, e.g.: All this differs from the Port Essington terms. Elbow, however, in the dialects there spoken, = waare; and forearm = am-ma-woor; wier, tao, = palm in Kowrarega.
It suggests caution in the comparison of vocabularies; since, by mistaking an inflexion or an affix for a part of the root, we may overlook really existing similarities. Father Anjello's very brief grammatical sketch of the Limbakarajia language of Port Essington* exhibits, as far as it goes, precisely the same principles as Mr. Macgillivray's Kowrarega; indeed, some of the details coincide.
Garnett in his masterly papers on the structure of the verb, is as follows: 1. The root. 2. The possessive pronoun. 3. A particle of time often originally one of place. To apply this doctrine to the Kowrarega with our present data, is unsafe. So are the double forms of the Imperative, namely the one in r, and the one in e.
Now, this analysis of the Kowrarega personals has exhibited the evolution of one sort of pronoun out of another, with the addition of certain words expressive of number, the result being no true inflexion but an agglutination or combination of separate words.
It may, however, be remarked, that wherever the Imperative ends in e, the Preterite has the form in m; thus, pid-e = dig, pid-ema = dug. The only exception is the anomalous form peneingodgi = dived. This prepares the future grammarian for a division of the Kowrarega Verbs into Conjugations. The last class of words that supply the materials of comment are the Substantives.
A small deep well behind the village, apparently the only one in the place, was almost entirely dried up. From the old man I procured the names of some of the neighbouring islands, and also a few other Kulkalega words which are so similar to those of the Kowrarega language as to corroborate Giaom's assertion that both have many words in common. By way of illustration I may give a few examples.
Now with these preliminary cautions against the over-valuation of apparent differences we may compare the new data for the structure of the Kowrarega and Limbakarajia with the reccived opinions respecting the Australian grammars in general.
Scarcely opposible to this supposition is the extreme improbability that the Papuans, who had nothing to gain from so comparatively inferior a race as the Australian, should be indebted to the latter for the words common to both found to exist in the Kowrarega and Miriam languages.
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