Lynette Oates has produced a comprehensive introduction to Muruwari, a language group straddling the NSW-Qld border south of Cunnamulla and north of Bourke, Brewarrina and Lightning Ridge. The reference is:

It includes over 1100 sentences and verbs for which Oates has provided a grammatical analysis. Unsurprisingly, for such a large body of work, there are some puzzles and mysteries for the general enquirer looking into the language as presented by Oates. Here is one of them, with Oates’s analysis below:

This can be further broken down:

In the ‘Bayala databases’ bayaladatabases.blogspot.com this has been respelt as shown above, together with a revised translation:

The following explanation of the components is offered for the non-specialist.

But in the case of the sentence being lookied at here, ‘I hear a dog barking’, as no-one or thing other than the  dog could be doing the barking, the sentence is said to be ‘intransitive’, and no suffix is needed. This no-suffix condition is called ‘absolutive’. When there is a question as to who or what is doing whatever, a suffix is needed to show the ‘do-er’. Such a suffix is referred to as ‘ergative’. In fact the ergative suffix is nothing more than a ‘flag’ to mark who is doing the action when there is a doubt.

In reality, in Muruwari, ‘bina’ means ‘ear’ and ‘Dini’ means ‘stand’. ‘ear-stand’. Imagine a dog with its ears pricked up. It is ‘hearing’ or ‘listening’. So that is what ‘binaDini’ means: ‘hear’ or ‘listen’; and it is in the present tense, as Oates has indicated.

Now comes the puzzle:

This would mean the whole sentence would read:

dog      barking he       hear     him-for / verbed / I / place

which is supposed to mean: ‘I hear a dog barking.’ It just does not seem to fit. 

Oates provided over 100 examples of the use of pidgin, or basically English words, incorporated into Muruwari everyday speech, such as the following three:

Given the sentence in which ‘buga‘ occurs, perhaps the ‘buga’ in ‘buga-ma-yu-na’ might be ‘bark’: ‘buga’, ‘bark’—why not? No more far fetched than the other pidgin examples.

And if so, what of the three suffixes attached to this stem: ‘-ma-yu-na’?

• ‘-ma’ is a suffix fairly widespread in NSW languages meaning ‘make’ or ‘do’, sometimes attached to nouns to make them into verbs, as suggested by Oates’s ‘VBS’, for ‘verbaliser’.

• ‘-yu’ is indeed the first-person bound pronoun ‘I’ as indicated by Oates’s ‘-1sg’ — but perhaps not in this instance. What if a simple transcription error had been made, and the suffix were in fact ‘-ya’ instead? This suffix occurs innumerable times in the Murawari record compiled by Oates, and is referred to as ‘declarative’ when attached to a verb stem. It cannot be readily translated, but it might be considered as meaning ‘in fact’ or ‘as a matter of fact’: hence the term ‘declarative’.

• ‘-na’, the final suffix, when attached to a verb, commonly has an idea of ‘place’. It can be translated as ‘here’ or ‘there’. This suffix is commonly written ‘-ni’ or ‘-na’; and when it is ‘-ni’ it might more possibly suggest ‘here in the present’, while ‘-na’ might correspondingly more likely denote ‘there in the past’.

Australian indigenous languages can be succinct and subtle in this use of verbal suffixes.

So, instead of Oates’s:

for ‘buga-ma-yu-na’, the real interpretation might instead be:

which sounds more plausible. And the whole sentence would be as shown earlier:

or ‘The dog barked; (I did) hear; bark did (it) there’, which more or less corresponds to the original translation of ‘I hear a dog barking’.