_Language._--Their language varied: the four principal tribes had different dialects. When they met at Flinders', communication was difficult, yet their songs were the same. The language has never been reduced to rules, though vocabularies have been collected by Jorgenson, and others. The Rev. Mr. Dove furnished some additional information; but though the specimens establish an affinity in these dialects, the results are otherwise unimportant. The vowels greatly predominate: the _r_ is sounded rough, and lingering. The words are frequently liquid and melodious. At Flinders' Island, the language was a mixture of several; broken English, New Holland, and Tasmanian words formed the currency of the island. In English, they dropped the _d_ and _s_; thus sugar is tugar, and doctor is togata. As with other barbarians, who have enjoyed the benefit of our instructions, the epithets of licentiousness and insult were most current, and most aptly applied. Strangers to abstract ideas, their words expressed the most common objects, sensations, and wants. Their songs, which reminded Labillardière of the music of the Arabs of Asia Minor, were exceedingly soft and plaintive; their voices not wanting in melody. They repeated the same note in soft and liquid syllables; descended to the second bar, and finished with a third above the key note. They sometimes varied, by suddenly running into the octave. Their strains were considered, by a Scotchman, a close resemblance to the Highland bagpipe. The stanzas they repeated again and again: none have been translated, for which, it is said, they are unfit.[33]
_Intellect._--Their intellectual character is low; yet not so inferior as often described. They appeared stupid, when addressed on subjects which had no relation to their mode of life; but they were quick and cunning within their own sphere. A country not producing any animal capable of service; where nothing is sharper than stone; destitute of grain, and of fruits of any value, could be inhabited only by a wandering race. Their locomotion sharpened their powers of observation, without much increasing their ideas. In such circumstances, mind may degenerate, but it cannot advance. Some colonists were recently startled, by the appearance of a white family from the remote interior: they were found by a surveyor, who at first took them for savages; they had the animal expression of the eye, which is so common to uncivilised people.