Monthly Archives: October 2015

mocha early: Salt water in Tasmania

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  First visit to SOAS
On Monday 3 April 1995 your Sydney-based amateur researcher into Australian languages called on the  ‘School of African and Oriental Studies [SOAS] in London in a vain quest to look up studies of the Sydney Aboriginal language by First Fleeter William Dawes’. It was known that they held the notebooks compiled by Dawes. A diary entry further records that ‘however, one needed a letter of introduction to gain access, from an authority such as a professor anywhere.  My own business card from the University of Sydney where I was an employee in its administration was not good enough’.
 
Yemmerawannie
Three years later, on another visit to London, another diary entry records a busy day: Monday 5 October 1998: ‘Then to St John the Baptist church, Eltham, to see the register of Yemmerawannie’s burial. This was an old book about 450 x 250 mm, brown leather bound with two large clasps, with entries from the 1600s. Photographed the Yemmerawannie entry.’ Yemmerawannie was one of two Aboriginals taken to London in 1792 by retiring Governor Arthur Phillip. He arrived in 1793, and died there a year later,a ged about 19.
 
Second visit to SOAS
Then that afternoon having caught the train to Charing Cross — the diary continues: ‘Walked to the School of Oriental and African Studies in Bloomsbury, where three years ago had been denied admission. This time, with a letter of introduction obtained from the professor of Classics at Sydney University, got in without trouble [and so to the library and] to the Special Reserve, where after a fright of their not holding the material, they finally found it. The purpose of the journey: to see the word lists of the Sydney Aboriginal language compiled around 1790 by Lt William Dawes, Royal Marine on the First Fleet.
…
Dawes’s notebooks
The precious packet, a small cardboard envelope-folder containing two pocket notebooks [was produced]. The slightly larger had a coloured cover, affecting waterworn stones. The smaller with a plain cover was a re-binding of two notebooks, one a word list arranged alphabetically, the other a ‘grammar’, all in Dawes’s own elegant handwriting. 
I was not required to handle these with surgical gloves, nor prevented from writing on them. The only security control was signs saying only portable computers and pencils could be used in the room: yet there was no frisking or search for ballpoints or pens. There I was, with Dawes’s actual notebooks, probably the best record anywhere of the Sydney Aboriginal language.
Tasmanian word lists
On beginning to make a few notes, I found in a home-made sleeve in the back of the large notebook some lists on differently sized pieces of paper of words of the Van Dieman’s Land language made by the French in 1792 or 1793. Amazingly, these included in two separate lists the word ‘kanguru’ for ‘kangourou’, (spelt in one case with k and the other with c). This suggested the possibility or probability that the word for ‘kangaroo’, already known not to be from Sydney, is of Tasmanian origin. I had always supposed that it might be from Cooktown, the other place where Cook had had some contact with Aborigines when his ship the Endeavour was repaired there after being damaged on the Great Barrier Reef. When was the word first used by white people? From Cook’s (1770) or Phillip’s (1788) visits?’
Database
A small database was begun of the 200 or so words in the SOAS Tasmanian lists, and that area was allowed to slip from the mind.
Book gift
On your researcher’s completing a master’s research degree on the Sydney language, his Macquarie University supervisor generously made him a present of a book by way of congratulations: a work on Tasmanian languages. That duly was placed on the bookshelves and dismissed from the mind. And so the years passed.
Visiting Tasmania
A tourist visit was made to Tasmania in October 1999, your researcher’s first experience of the island. A briefer visit was made in the present year, 2015, when various modest enquiries were made about languages on visiting various museums. 
Vocabularies
A volunteer in one was kind enough to go home and fetch a book she had on the subject, and on being shown it your researcher thought it looked familiar. On returning home a few days lated he found it was the very work presented to him in 2005-06. This is a collection of all the known 40 or so vocabularies:
Plomley, Norman James Brian. 1976. A word-list of the Tasmanian Aboriginal languages. Launceston: N.J.B. Plomley in association with the Government of Tasmania.
 
This is a work of 478 pages, in which all the records are presented in the manner of a dictionary, English word alphabetically by English word, with all the Tasmanian records listed below for each, with all the diverse spellings of them, together with information of the recorder and informant, and the area (where known in Tasmania) where it was collected.
Noted scholar of Australian languages R.W.W. Dixon wrote in:
Dixon, R.M.W. 1980. The Languages of Australia. Edited by W. S. Allen and et al., Cambridge Language Surveys. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.:
  • “A handful of word lists were taken down by early settlers but these are of extremely poor quality; they were compiled by people who for the most part had little respect for the Tasmanians or their languages, and no clear idea of how to represent the sounds they heard. Within the last few decades a new manuscript vocabulary has come to light, compiled by George Augustus Robinson, a self-styled missionary who rounded up the survivors of Tasmanian tribes between 1829 and 1834 and transported them to offshore islands, effectively there to die off. Robinson took down a considerable quantity of  vocabulary, some of it from parts of the island that had not been represented in previous lists; but the standard of his transcription was even worse than the rest.”

 

Processing the records
Your researcher considered that it was time to look at the Tasmanian language records, especially given that he appeared to have virtually all of them in a book in his own study. By a process of scanning, optical character recognition and other manipulation, he added all the records to his tiny Tasmanian database, thereby enlarging it from 200 records to 10500. But this is just the beginning. The next step is to respell all the records consistently, and to provide consistent translations. These processes will reveal points of interest and enable searches to be made. 

 

Various scholars have already concluded that there were probably several languages on the island, and here is a map by one of them, Claire Bowern, in 2012. She has identified five languages. A sixth area coloured grey on the map was largely uninhabited, and hence had no language recorded for it.
 
First example of what the database can reveal
After the foregoing introduction, a small point is to be made for this blog entry.
There is a record :
mocha early: salt water
It is by:
Braim in History of New South Wales (1846); (bmm) manuscript vocabulary, Braim papers, Mitchell Library.
The database is already able to provide the following analysis.
 
“mocha early” is nothing to do with being ‘early’. Rather mocha is a word for ‘water’. 
And “early” is nothing more than a misreading of the original handwriting of “carty”, as porvided in: 
Vocabulary of Jorgen Jorgenson: (jj) words collected by Jorgen
“carty”, respelt as /gadi/ turns out to be a word for ‘bad’.
Consequently “mocha carty” or /mudya gadi/ is ‘water bad’, or ‘bad water’.
‘Bad water’ is one of the ways the Tasmanians spoke of ‘salt water’, or the ‘sea’. It was, after all, not drinkable.
This then shows that the translation of “mocha carty” in the 5th line of the table above contains an error in the translation. It does not mean ‘water bag’ but rather ‘water bad’.
 
This analysis already confirms what Dixon stated: the Tasmanian records are ‘of extremely poor quality’.
 
 

 

JMS Monday 25 May 2015

TASMANIA: Having a look at suffixes

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Affixes: prefixes, infixes, suffixes — the lot
Joseph Milligan, who provided more extensive vocabularies than anyone else, famously stated about the Tasmanian languages:
“The affixes, which signify nothing, are la, lah, le, leh, leah, na, ne, nah, ba, be, beah, bo, ma, me, meah, pa, poo, ra, re, ta, te, ak, ek, ik, etc.”
 
He further declared: “The distinctly different pronunciation of a word by the same person on different occasions is very perplexing, until the radical or essential part of the word, apart from prefixes and suffixes, is caught hold of.”
 
Today we can only take his word on the matter of pronunciation. And he is right about there being prefixes and suffixes. But it is a pity that when he had the chance to enquire as to the specific meaning of the suffixes he did not do so, instead dismissing them as meaningless. You might equally say of English that its prepositions are meaningless. In Aboriginal languages, the suffixes are what make them all work.
 
Pronouns and cases
Milligan was not alone in giving no explanation of the suffixes. Hardly any of the multitude of them are identified by any of the recorders. One word often appearing as a suffix, mina: 1sg — ‘I’ and ‘me‘ — is identified; as equally is nina 2sg ‘thou’, ‘thee’ (you). But what about ‘we’, ‘you’ (plural), and ‘they’? And did the pronouns have ‘you-two’ and ‘you-all’ forms in common with other Aboriginal languages? And likewise ‘we-two’ and ‘we-all’ (as well as inclusive and exclusive versions of these), and ‘they-two’ and ‘they-all’? There is virtually no trace of these vital words in any of the lists.
 
Similarly, what about the case endings of nouns? There is no information, or practically none,  about nominative (subject) and accusative (object) functions. Nor about the possessive (‘of’), the dative — whether ‘to’, ‘towards’ or ‘for’ (known as allative and purposive by some specialists), nor the ablative (‘by’: causitive; ‘from’: elative; ‘with’: comitative; and ‘at’, ‘in’, ‘on’: locative). Nor instrumental ‘with’, ‘using’ (as ‘I hit the nail with a hammer’). These are all common in Aboriginal languages, and may well have been present in the list of suffixes ‘signifying nothing’ to Milligan.
 
Tasmanian languages
So it is that your amateur researcher (YAR) is currently investigating the vocabularies of the several languages of Tasmania, in an attempt to establish that Milligan’s list really did mean something after all. The Tasmanian languages are shown in the following illustration: 
 
Map by Claire Bowern
 
in counter-clockwise sequence from where they were first encountered in the south:
South-East
Oyster Bay
North-East
North
West
together with possibly South; and perhaps others.
 
While large numbers of suffixes have been determined from the records, many may not have been accurately fixed. For as Milligan cautioned, it is necessary to catch hold of the STEM of a word, and separate it from any SUFFIX present. But the question remains: where does a particular stem end and a suffix start? Very often it is not easy to tell …
karnamoonalané conversation (a great talking)
mar.pe.gen.ne.mar.tun.ni I think
mur.man.a.wee.bob.ar.ree fighting
Try it yourself.
 
 
Proprietive: ‘having’
The main purpose of the present essay is to propose the identification of one suffix, which might even be a combination of two.
 
Aboriginal languages probably universally have a pair of contrasting suffixes for the concepts ‘having’ and ‘lacking’, sometimes termed proprietive, and abessive or privative, respectively.
 
One particular suffix had been noted in the Tasmanian database, which is combined with a variety of words without any apparent connection with one another. Here it is:
-wadina:
 
 
 
Fig. 1 -wadina records
The suffix concerned: -wadina. The last, purple, column reveals the source of the records, and the language where known. Many records include no such territorial information, but where it occurs in the examples above it is NE in all instances — except one for neighbouring Oyster Bay. This would suggest that the corresponding suffix for other languages might be something different.
 
The proposed meaning for the -wadina suffix is the proprietive ‘having’. The first two examples suggested it might mean ‘red’, as part of the term ‘ochre red’ but on further reflection this explanation seemed unlikely. 
And such is the impoverished quality of the Tasmanian records generally that in almost every case in the table when YAR attempted to establish a precise meaning he was unable to find anything worth reporting to back up the suggestion that the linking concept for -wadina might be ‘having’.
 
Body parts?
It might be briefly noted that some of the entries are for body parts; but as many are not, that does not appear to be a feasible interpretation of -wadina either. 
Note also that ‘spit’ in the centre of the table might actually be a mis-transcription of ‘shut’. 
And the record for ‘child’ might in reality mean ‘woman-having’, this being confirmed in part by Fig. 5 (luwa: ‘woman’) as well as by multitudinous other examples in the database. But ‘woman-having’ would be a more appropriate term for a ‘husband’ (one who has a woman) than for a child — unless ‘child’ were to be viewed as ‘mother-having’. 
 
Many meanings of luwina
A rare record occurs in the database where luwi actually means ‘child’ rather than ‘woman’:
 
Fig. 2 luwi-na: ‘child’
 
Note, however, that the word luwi- (with diverse suffixes) also happens to mean a variety of other things, among which are ‘blue wren’, ‘cold’ (weather), ‘cut’ (wood with axe), ‘gun’, ‘hip bone’, ‘itch’, ‘moon’, ‘navel’, ‘night’, ‘one’, ‘plenty’, ‘rub’, ‘sister’, ‘sky’, ‘snake’, ‘stone’, ‘sun’, ‘three’, ‘tree’ and ‘tuber’. This might seem an oddly diverse collection, but sometimes some possible links can be dimly perceived. Thus the group [cold / night / moon / sun / plenty] might all be to do with looking at the heavens, at night, when it might be cold, and when there are myriads of celestial objects to look at: the European recorder catching the words at the time might well have jumped to incorrect conclusions as to meanings. Even [cut / gun / itch] might conceivably be linked through ‘weapon’, old muskets when discharged with shot perhaps causing ‘itch’ rather than severe wounding. And so on.
 
baga: child
Consider then three other examples:
Fig. 3 Child-having
 
In Fig. 3 it is assumed that baga and biga are different renderings of the same word, ‘child’.
There are many records for ‘testicles’ (apologies here for any indelicacy in mentioning this word and subject) in the Tasmanian Bayala database. Most are similar to the following, which was collected in 1793 by the officers of the French frigates La Recherche and l’Espérance, at Recherche Bay in the south-east of the island.
 
Fig. 4 Ball
 
mada indicates circularity, roundness, or ‘ball’.
 
But two of the examples in Fig. 3 have a different (i.e. non-mada) concept for ‘testicle’. The third example has (at first sight improbably) the identical form to the second, but an entirely different meaning: not ‘testicle’ but ‘mother’.
 
Perhaps from Fig. 3 it might be inferred that the Tasmanians had real understanding of the procreative process, for how else might the different attributed meanings be reconciled?
 
The next table merely provides some common words for ‘child’ and ‘woman’.
 
Fig. 5 ‘child’ and ‘woman’
 
Conclusion
YAR is not particularly happy with the identification of -wadina as meaning ‘having’, but puts it forward in the hope that some reader might be prompted to offer a more plausible interpretation.
 
The intention is to provide, in due course, suggestions as to what other suffixes might mean.
 
 
 
JEREMY STEELE
Tuesday 20 October 2015

 

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