It is beyond all doubt that the vocabularies of the Aborigines differed widely in different parts. Frequently, the English have carried a word known in one district to a district where it was not known, the aboriginals regarding the word as pure English. In several books statements will be found that such and such a word is not Aboriginal, when it really has an aboriginal source but in a different part of the Continent. Mr. Threlkeld, in his <i>Australian Grammar</i>, which is especially concerned with the language of the Hunter River, gives a list of "barbarisms," words that he considers do not belong to the aboriginal tongue. He says with perfect truth-"Barbarisms have crept into use, introduced by sailors, stockmen, and others, in the use of which both blacks and whites labour under the mistaken idea, that each one is conversing in the other's language." And yet with him a "barbarism" has to be qualified as meaning "not belonging to the Hunter District." But Mr. Threlkeld is not the only writer who will not acknowledge as aboriginal sundry words with an undoubted Australian pedigree.
(b) Maori.
The Maori language, the Italian of the South, has received very different treatment from that meted out by fate and indifference to the aboriginal tongues of Australia. It has been studied by competent scholars, and its grammar has been comprehensively arranged and stated. A Maori Dictionary, compiled more than fifty years ago by a missionary, afterwards a bishop, has been issued in a fourth edition by his son, who is now a bishop. Yet, of Maori also, the same thing is said with respect to etymology. A Maori scholar told me that, when he began the study many years ago, he was warned by a very distinguished scholar not to seek for derivations, as the search was full of pitfalls. It was not maintained that words sprang up without an origin, but that the true origin of most of the words was now lost. In spite of this double warning, it may be maintained that some of the origins both of Maori and of Australian words have been found and are in this book recorded.
The pronunciation of Maori words differs so widely from that of Australian aboriginal names that it seems advisable to insert a note on the subject.
Australian aboriginal words have been written down on no system, and very much at hap-hazard. English people have attempted to express the native sounds phonetically according to English pronunciation. No definite rule has been observed, different persons giving totally different values to represent the consonant and vowel sounds. In a language with a spelling so unphonetic as the English, in which the vowels especially have such uncertain and variable values, the results of this want of system have necessarily been very unsatisfactory and often grotesque. Maori words, on the other hand, have been written down on a simple and consistent system, adopted by the missionaries for the purpose of the translation of the Bible. This system consists in giving the Italian sound to the vowels, every letter—vowel and consonant—having a fixed and invariable value. Maori words are often very melodious. In pronunciation the best rule is to pronounce each syllable with a nearly equal accent.
Care has been taken to remember that this is an Australasian <i>English</i> and not a Maori Dictionary; therefore to exclude words that have not passed into the speech of the settlers. But in New Zealand Maori is much more widely used in the matter of vocabulary than the speech of the aborigines is in Australia, or at any rate in the more settled parts of Australia; and the Maori is in a purer form. Though some words and names have been ridiculously corrupted, the language of those who dwell in the bush in New Zealand can hardly be called <i>Pigeon English</i>, and that is the right name for the "lingo" used in Queensland and Western Australia, which, only partly represented in this book, is indeed a falling away from the language of Bacon and Shakspeare.
IV. LAW OF HOBSON-JOBSON.
In many places in the Dictionary, I find I have used the expression "the law of Hobson-Jobson." The name is an adaptation from the expression used by Col. Yule and Mr. Burnell as a name for their interesting Dictionary of Anglo-Indian words. The law is well recognised, though it has lacked the name, such as I now venture to give it. When a word comes from a foreign language, those who use it, not understanding it properly, give a twist to the word or to some part of it from the hospitable desire to make the word at home in its new quarters, no regard, however, being paid to the sense. The most familiar instance in English is <i>crayfish</i> from the French <i>ecrevisse</i>, though it is well known that a crayfish is not a fish at all. Amongst the Mohammedans in India there is a festival at which the names of "Hassan" and "Hosein" are frequently called out by devotees. Tommy Atkins, to whom the names were naught, converted them into "Hobson, Jobson." That the practice of so altering words is not limited to the English is shown by two perhaps not very familiar instances in French, where "Aunt Sally" has become <i>ane sale</i>, "a dirty donkey," and "bowsprit" has become <i>beau pre</i>, though quite unconnected with "a beautiful meadow." The name "Pigeon English" is itself a good example. It has no connection with pigeon, the bird, but is an Oriental's attempt to pronounce the word "business." It hardly, however, seems necessary to alter the spelling to "pidjin."
It may be thought by some precisians that all Australasian English is a corruption of the language. So too is Anglo-Indian, and, <i>pace</i> Mr. Brander Matthews, there are such things as Americanisms, which were not part of the Elizabethan heritage, though it is perfectly true that many of the American phrases most railed at are pure old English, preserved in the States, though obsolete in Modern England; for the Americans, as Lowell says, "could not take with them any better language than that of Shakspeare." When we hear railing at slang phrases, at Americanisms, some of which are admirably expressive, at various flowers of colonial speech, and at words woven into the texture of our speech by those who live far away from London and from Oxford, and who on the outskirts of the British Empire are brought into contact with new natural objects that need new names, we may think for our comfort on the undoubted fact that the noble and dignified language of the poets, authors and preachers, grouped around Lewis XIV., sprang from debased Latin. For it was not the classical Latin that is the origin of French, but the language of the soldiers and the camp-followers who talked slang and picked words up from every quarter. English has certainly a richer vocabulary, a finer variety of words to express delicate distinctions of meaning, than any language that is or that ever was spoken: and this is because it has always been hospitable in the reception of new words. It is too late a day to close the doors against new words. This <i>Austral English Dictionary</i> merely catalogues and records those which at certain doors have already come in.