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Information supplied by Mr. [F.J. Watson], [Toowong].

In the study of te toponomy of S.E. Queensland there are
several peculiarities of aboriginal philology and speech to be
taken into consideration, one of these being a consonant
which has no representative in the English alphabet, but which
may best be represented by the digraph 'dh'.

This consonat may be mearly pronounced by attampting to
pronounce the English word 'jam' without touching the palate
with the tongue, thus converting the sound from a palatal to
a dental.

A good deal of confusion has been caused by the variation of
this consonant, which has been rendered by translators, variously,
as t, d, ch, and j. Especially so has this been in the
translation of place names and particularly so in the case of
the word dhagun, which means place, land or country.

As an affix to place names, the aboriginaes, by their common
practice of eliding the letter g when it occurred between vowels,
habitually abbreviated dhagum to dhan, and by the further
elisoion ofn to dha. Thus it occurs in translations as da, ta,
tan, dan, cha, and tya. This word may be iether a prefix or an
affix.

Examples are, Burand-da, meaning "place of wind"; Taa-binga,
from Dha-bengga, "place of jumper ants"; [Tamborine], which should
be Tan-buragun, meaning "place of boormerangs" (Note that in the
word buragun, the first vowel is nearly elided and the letter
'r' stressed; and [Caboolture] (in which-ture has been converted
from cha or tya), from Kabul-dha, meaning "place of carpte snakes).

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