ORIGIN LEGENDS AND LINGUISTIC RELATIONSHIPS

The paper begins by discussing a number of Aboriginal legends, referri ng to geographical events, that have a clear historical basis, before giving a number of legends about the direction from which ancestors ca me into contact-time territory. A final section shows how some origin legends correlate with the direction in which the closest linguistic r elationships are found, and speculates that other legends may suggest hypotheses for where to look for genetic relationships between languag es.