Lancelot Edward Threlkeld, born in 1788, is, or was, exactly 150 years older than your modern-day amateur student of Awabakal, the Lake Macquarie language he worked on, all by himself, with no-one to discuss things with. Your amateur student [YAS] knows the feeling well, as probably no-one else has worked closely on this language, apart from book editor John Fraser in 1892. So for Threlkeld in the 1830s, translating the gospels must have been a lonely business, especially as the realisation must have grown that fewer and fewer people were ever likely to see or be able to appreciate what he was doing for them, as the Aboriginal people dwindled in numbers in his neighbourhood, by moving away, or dying. Until finally there were none left.
So when Threlkeld one day re-looked at what he had translated in one particular passage, he spotted what he thought must have been an error, and changed it. There was no-one he could discuss the matter with, and so the change went ahead. Here it is:
It is verse 6 of Chapter 14 of St Mark’s Gospel, the King James version of which reads:
[6] And Jesus said, Let her alone; why trouble ye her? she hath wrought a good work on me.
Before looking at the correction itself, it is worth considering the marginal note that is barely legible in this photograph of the page, it being partially lost in the binding of the notebook. But the English translation allows the guess to be made that it is trouble, underlined, to match the underlined word in the text alongside: ‘koakilleen’. This was Threlkeld’s method: he would underline a word he had devised or chosen to use in his translation for which there was no readily known word in the Awabakal language, and then would make a marginal annotation to indicate what he had done.
‘koakilleen’, or guwa-gi-li-n is ‘scold-be-ing-now’, or ‘scolding’, ‘rebuking’, ‘quarrelling’ and similar ideas, and hence ‘trouble’.
Now for the correction, the subject of this short essay.
A word-for-word translation of Threlkeld’s translation of verse 6 reads:
AND JESU-ERG he speak-did, move-permit-IMP! her; what-because you-all scold-be-ing-now her? good make-done to her-of me
of which the key part is the final phrase:
good make-done to her-of me
which ought to mean:
she hath wrought a good work on me.
but it does not. In fact Threlkeld should have left it as it was in the first place, for the following reason:
| BEFORE CORRECTION | AFTER CORRECTION | |
| original | murroróng umatoara bountoa ba tia. | murroróng umatoara bounnoun ba tia. |
| respelt | marurung umadwara bunduwa ba diya | marurung umadwara bununba diya |
| word-for-word | good make-done to she DONE me | good make-done to her-of (hers) me |
| idiomatic | she has done me good | hers me good |
| Bible King James Version | she hath wrought a good work on me. | [nonsense] |
What happened? Why did Threlkeld make the correction? One can only speculate, but the reason might have been this.
On one day doing a quick check of the text, Threlkeld must have spotted the words ‘bountoa ba’, and assumed them to be a simple wrong rendering of ‘bounnounba’ or ‘bounnoun ba’, and made the alteration accordingly.
Reasoning: ‘bountoa’ [bunduwa] is ‘she’ while ‘bounnoun’ [bunun] is ‘her;
and ‘bounnoun ba’ is the possessive (genitive) form, ‘hers’.
Threlkeld just saw ‘bountoa ba’ (she-of), automatically assumed he had blundered, and so ‘corrected’ it to ‘bounnoun ba’ (her-of, or hers) (bununba). Evidently he was distracted by the presence of ‘ba’.
But in fact the original translation was not an error: ‘bountoa’ in this instance just happened to be followed by the particle or clitic ‘ba’.
In this Aboriginal language, and in many others, very short words like this (ba) can have a variety of roles. And so in Awabakal, ba, apart from changing a pronoun from the accusative case to the genitive, may when suffixed to verbs convey the sense of ‘do‘; or it can express the idea of ‘done’ in a phrase, to indicate achievement, as it was doing in the instance here, prior to its erroneous altering.
Alas, Threlkeld had no-one looking over his shoulder that day, or indeed at any time, and hence no-one he could discuss such matters with. He was working in a virtual vacuum, with only his occasional Aboriginal informant Biraban to consult, who was poles apart from Threlkeld in his level of education and power. Mostly Threlkeld must have worked entirely on his own, grappling with having to come up with words for ‘wrought’, ’whensoever’, ‘aforehand’, ‘anoint’, ‘gospel’, ‘preach’, ‘memorial’ and ‘betray’ to take examples only from the next four verses, none of which words would likely feature in the day-to-day vocabulary of a member of a hunter-gatherer society.
At least your modern-day amateur student, likewise with no-one to consult, but possessed of a computer of unimaginable capability to someone of a century and a half ago, can write a blog entry like this one and post it on the internet, in the hope that someone might chance upon it, and comment on it, and even tell him he is wrong.
JEREMY STEELE
Friday 25 May 2018
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