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If the vocables which extend over many districts of
Australia are few, the grammatical structure of
the diverse languages spoken over this continent
furnishes much more numerous points of
decided resemblance. (* see previous page) The most remarkable
feature in the Australian languages is one common to
all of them, the elastic power of modification in their
verbs. Going from Britain eastward to find step by
step an increase in the modifications of the verb.
In Greek there is a middle voice as well as an active
and passive, and a dual form in each tense between the
singular and plural. In the Semitic languages - in Hebrew
for instance there are not only 3 voices - active
passive and middle - but intensive, causative and
reflective [Kal, niphal, piel, pual, hiphil, hophal,
and hithpael]. Coming further Eastward to
Australia we find a still larger number of
modifications. There is a dual as in the Greek
and Hebrew; and the dual pronoun distinguishes by an
inflexion whether "we two" means "you and I"
or some third person and I. And the verb