¹ These notes have been written because of the desirability of making at least a brief study comparing Australian with Melanesian Pidgin. It was not possible to obtain an informant to dictate material orally; but in the absence of oral dictation, it seemed practicable to use printed material provided it could be interpreted in terms of one speaker's pronunciation. The desired material was at hand in the Australian Pidgin quotations in Phyllis M. Kaberry's Aboriginal Woman: Sacred and Profane (London, 1939), to which page references are given in this article for all citations. This material was transcribed phonetically by the present writer on the basis of Miss Kaberry's pronunciation, and then analyzed, with emphasis primarily on the points of comparison with Melanesian Pidgin. The resultant analysis has been examined and corrected by Miss Kaberry, who has also furnished a few additional expressions (indicated by the letter K in the article) from memory.

² As contrasted with the situation in Melanesian Pidgin, where an unaccented and variable obscure vowel between two consonants is a function of the consonant cluster.

³ For typographical reasons, stress will be indicated (by an acute accent mark) only if it does not fall on the first syllable.

⁴ This is possibly the interpretation which should be placed on the element f∊lə in the apparently aberrant Melanesian Pidgin form liklikf∊lə ‘small’ (Hall, Melanesian Pidgin English: Grammar, Texts, Vocabulary §7.13), and the sentence in which it occurs corrected to read bon i-liklik f∊lə ‘the bones were small ones’.

⁵ The verb bin ‘was’ also occurs independently; cf. below, 2.b.

⁶ Miss Kaberry writes: This is sometimes used by the natives, but the common term is šugərbæg.'

⁷ As done by Churchill, Reinecke, and others.