IXTEODrCTIOJf. ' XXVU
root ma, mo, mu. The late Bishop Caldwell says* — "Mudal is connected with the Tamil postposition miin, 'before'; mudal is used as the root of a new A-erb ' to begin.' Mu evidently signifies 'priority,' and may be the same as the Tamil mu, 'to be old,' mudu, ' antiquity.' " I think there is a better derivation than that. The Sanskrit miila means ' origin, cause, commencement,' and is the same word as the Malay mul a already referred to, aud both of these I take from the Sanskrit root-word bhii, 'to begin to be, to become, to be,' with which is connected the Latin fore (fuere), 'to be about to be,' fui, &c. From bhu come such Sanskrit words as bhava, ' birth, origin,' bhavana, 'caus- ing to be,' b huvauytt, 'a master or lord ' (rf. piran, &c.), and many other words in the Aryan languages. At all events, wakul and these other Australian words for ' one ' are assuredly from the same root as the Dravidian mu-dal, 'first,' 'a begin- nig.' I, for one, cannot believe that words so much alike both in root and meaning should have sprung up by accident over so vast an area as India, Malaya, Kew Gruinea, Fiji, Samoa, and back again to the New Hebrides and Australia. The only rational explanation seems to me to be that these races were all at one time part of a common stock, that in their dispersion they carried with them the root-words of the parent languages, and that in their new habitations they dressed out these root-words with j)refixes and affixes by a process of development, just as circum- stances required.
Results. — The root in its simplest form is ha, ' to begin to be,'
- to begin'; other forms are ho, bu, hi ; ma, mo, mu ; fa,fu, vu ;
wa. The nearest approach to the Australian ?«fl^?;/, 'one,' is the Ebudan hoJcol, 'one,' and the Tukiok maTcal-a, 'for the first time,' but many other cognate words are found all over the South Seas in the sense of 'first,' 'begin.' The Tasmanian mara-wa, 'one,' is the same as the Tukiok mar a, ' for the first time,' and mara, 100; and in New South AVales, mara-gai means ' first ' in the Mudgee dialect.
2. Tlie Numeral Tico.
Almost the only other Australian numeral is b til a, ' two.' It is true that several tribes have a distinct word for ' three,' and a few have a word for ' five ' taken from the word ' hand,' but in most parts of Australiii the number ' three ' is expressed by ' two-one,' four ' by ' two-two,' ' five ' by ' two-two-one ' and so on. But the wore bula is universal ; with various changes of termination, it exists from Tasmania in the extreme south, right on to the Gulf
- A11 my knowledge of the Dravidian race and language comes from Dr.
Caldwell's "Comparative Dictionary of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages ; second edition ; London : Triibner and Co., lS7i>." In this Introduction, I quote from the notes which I made when I read the book some years ago, and now I cannot always tell whether I am quoting his words or only my own statement of them.
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