MESSRS. MACMILLAN AND COMPANY announce among their spring publications a Life of Adam Smith, by John Rae. The recent revival of interest in the life and works of Adam Smith, stimulated in part by the Economic Club of London, besides having occasioned the preparation of a Catalogue of Smith's library by Mr. Bonar and the forthcoming volume by Mr. Rae, is likely to lead, it may be expected, to further results.
1 The English translation of this poem is by Alistair Reid. 2 The Aboriginal people I refer to typically have a “whitefeller name” and a traditional name, e.g. Pat Gabori and Kabararrjingathi bulthuku. Traditional names often have a strong element of privacy, sometimes even comparable to a pin number on a bank account, and are used sparingly if at all, so in general I will use their whitefeller names in this text. 3 Pinker and Bloom (1990:715). 4 And if we take more complicated sentences as examples, we see that other nouns (basically all nouns except the subject) also get the tense-marking. “He speared the turtle with big brother’s spear” is niya raajarra bangana thabujukarrangunina wumburungunina: thabujukarra means “big brother’s,” wumburung“spear,” -karra “belonging to,” and -nguni “with, using.” As you can see, “turtle,” “big brother’s,” and “spear” all get the past tense suffix -na. The instrumental suffix -nguni also ends up on all words in the noun phrase “big brother’s spear.” This penchant for agreement is another highly unusual characteristic of Kayardild, which I do not go into here: it can lead to nouns stacking up four case suffixes at a stretch, to a level of complexity not found in any other human language – see Evans (1995a, 1995b, 2003b, 2006). 5 It turns out, in fact, that quite a number of languages mark tense on nouns – see Nordlinger and Sadler (2004) for a comprehensive survey and discussion. 6 For the moment I simply assert this figure, but we return to the grounds it is based on in chapter 10.