Dieri is an Aboriginal language once spoken to the east of Lake Eyre in Cooper Creek country in the Sturt Stony Desert in north-west South Australia. In 1874 a 51-page text, “The Dieyerie tribe of Australian Aborigines”, by local resident Samuel Gason, was published.
Information from <https://www.southaustralianhistory.com.au/gason.htm> reveals that Gason, in 1864 in his early twenties, accepted a position in the South Australian police force and was posted to Lake Hope, in Dieri country about halfway between Lake Eyre and the Queensland border. He was to stay there until 1871, after which he transferred to Barrow Creek in the Northern Territory. It was during this time that the government published his work on the Dieri people. By the time he resigned in 1876 he had completed around twelve years of outback police service. The final twenty years of his life were spent mainly in Beltana midway between Lake Hope and Port Augusta, as a manager/proprietor of several hotels, apart from a 2-3 year stint as an auctioneer there. He died in this vicinity in 1887 in his early fifties.
Gason hardly had a sympathetic view of his subject. He wrote: “A more treacherous race I do not believe exists. They imbibe treachery in infancy, and practice it until death, and have no sense of wrong in it.” However, he described their way of life in detail, and provided an extensive vocabulary. He also included the following translation of ‘a selection’ from the Ten Commandments:
The challenge to your researcher was to work out which Commandments were represented, and what the words meant.
First, the Commandments are numbered in a multiplicity of ways by different denominations, but in Exodus chapter 20 in the King James Version [KJV] of the Bible the following is given:
| 1 | I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. |
| 2 | Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments. |
| 3 | Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain. |
| 4 | Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it. |
| 5 | Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee. |
| 6 | Thou shalt not kill. |
| 7 | Thou shalt not commit adultery. |
| 8 | Thou shalt not steal. |
| 9 | Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour. |
| 10 | Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s. |
When Samuel Gason was writing in the early 1870s, the KJV is what he would have used.
Using Gason’s own vocabulary, your researcher came up with the following analysis:
Athona yoora Goda
1st. [commandment]
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
child [?] love GOD
Watta yoondroo aunchanapitta, paroo, ya ya pittapilkildra windrie Goda, yondroo aunchana
2nd. [commandment]
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing …
no you father xxx [bida], stop and and [all?] something else xxx [bida] only GOD, you(r} father
Watta Goda yoondroo caukooelie dikana
3rd. [commandment]
Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain
no GOD you(r) nothing-of dub-ing
Apirrie, ya andrie, parabara oondrana thana thipie aumanunthoo
4th. [commandment]
Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.
father, and mother [with force and strength] think-ing they-all live breast milk
Watta yoondroo narrie nundrala
5th. [commandment]
Thou shalt not kill.
no you dead/corpse dead-towards
Watta yoondroo pulakaunchie
6th. [commandment]
Thou shalt not commit adultery.
no you desire [?] certain
Watta yoondroo kooriekaunchie
7th. [commandment]
Thou shalt not steal.
no you thief certain
Watta yoondroo kurna komanelie, caukooelie ulchulchamuna
8th. [commandment]
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
no you(r) man own friend nothing-of threaten-ing.
Watta yoondroo bootoo thoola milkirrana ya, noa thoola watta yoondroo milkirrana baukooaumanuntho
9th. [commandment]
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.
no you property stranger eye-xxx (covet) and, spouse stranger no you eye-xxx nothing breast milk
Gason’s vocabulary consisted of about 1800 entries, and when these were added to a database it became possible to analyse the words used in the Commandments translations and to speculate as to which Commandment was which as the following exposition by means of tables derived from the database reveals.
Athona yoora Goda
aDana yura GODa
1st. [commandment]
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
child [?] love GOD
In these tables, the grey columns are the original entries. Those to the right of them, in dark orange and yellow, are modern simplifications: respelling in the first case and a standardised English form in the second. The final pink column shows the source of the entry, including page and line number, and a reference to the language (often in abbreviated form, for reasons of space)
As seen above, in the database some visually distinguishing capitalising (and other) conventions are used in the ‘respelt’ column to distinguish usages in the original record, but which do not affect the computer’s sorting capability.
The very first word, Athona, is doubtful in the context of the Commandment. It appears to mean some form of family relation. The next word yoora is ‘love’ as the two examples from around twenty show:
The final word, Goda, is simply ‘God’. If the terminal -a is a suffix, perhaps nominative or accusative, such information is not revealed in the Gason wordlist.
There is no Commandment about ‘love’ in the standard 10 Commandments set, but ‘loving’ certainly does occur in the basic set of two in St Matthew’s gospel (22:37-40):
Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
This is the first and great commandment.
And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
Perhaps this is what this 1st Commandment relates to.
Watta yoondroo aunchanapitta, paroo, ya ya pittapilkildra windrie Goda, yondroo aunchana
wada yundru andyana bida, baru, ya ya bida bilgildra windri GODa, yundru andyana
2nd. [commandment]
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing …
no you make any [bida], stop and and [all?] something else any [bida] only GOD, you make
The word Wata is to feature frequently in the following Commandments. It means ‘no’:
Likewise Yondroo occurs often, meaning ‘thou’:
The next word, “Aunchana”, is also the next significant problem. Respelling enables links to be uncovered, but they offer limited assistance. ‘Father’ is unlikely, as there is a more normal form as will be encountered later. Perhaps the word indicates a positive emotion or sentiment, such as ‘caress’, ‘desire’, ‘wish’, as might apply in wishing for a graven image.
However, should this really be the Commandment ‘Thou shalt not make …’, and as ‘no thou’ has already occurred, could the word be ‘make’?
The final two examples in Table 5 suggest this might well be the case, revealed when a search was undertaken for ‘mak(e)’. The original spellings, and subsequent respellings, did not suggest this likely interpretation at first.
Another problem arises with Pitta:
How can ‘wood’, or more unlikely ‘navel’, fit into the Commandment? Perhaps the ‘image’ might be made of wood, to stand for ‘graven’ The third example in Table 6 features ‘dinDi’, for which explanations are offered in two examples below it.
If the word sequence concept were to be followed once again, and given that that in the English Commandment only one word occurs twice (‘any’), and here is Pitta for the second time, then ‘any’ would seem to be a possible interpretation notwithstanding the apparent irrelevancies in Table 6.
The next group, paroo, ya ya, is challenging. ‘baru’ signifying ‘fish’ is improbable, but the meaning ‘stop’ could possibly fit.
What about ya ya for which there are no examples in the Gason record, other than ya = ‘and’. Perhaps the second ‘ya’ might be valid as ‘and’, and the fist intended to be attached to to the precious word to make ‘baruya’. There are no such examples. Could paroo, ya ya be a misprint, say, for Parchana, for which the meaning as given in Table 7 is ‘all’? All this seems unconvincincing, leaving the possibility suggested by the English word sequence, ‘image’ … ‘ any graven image’. There are no words in the vocabulary for ‘image’.
… ya pittapilkildra windrie Goda, yondroo aunchana
… and something else xxx [bida] only GOD, you(r) father
… or any likeness of any thing
Assume ya, ‘and’, is an equivalent for ‘or’. Next, the mystery pitta occurs again —possibly ‘any’— followed by Pilkildra.
Table 8 suggests ‘other’ as a possibility for ‘bigildra’, perhaps representing ‘any thing’.
‘windri’ might be ‘only’, as Table 9 suggests.:
The word following is Goda again, making ‘only God’.
The final two words yondroo aunchana were encountered at the beginning of this Commandment, meaning ‘you make’.
In summary then:
Watta Goda yoondroo caukooelie dikana
wada GODa yundru gaguwili digana
3rd. [commandment]
Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain
no GOD you(r) nothing-of dub-ing
In the 3rd Commandment, the first three words are now familiar: no God thou.
The next word, caukooelie, had no matches in the Gason vocabulary but computer searches came up with the possibility of Baukoelie, as shown in Table 11.
This might be the intention, and shows that misprinting might also be an obstacle in trying to make sense of the translations.
The final word, dikana, was relatively simple to resolve.
The word ‘dub’ in the yellow column might seem odd. The reason for it is that in the databases it has been found useful to have words not subject to confusion, words such as ‘light’ (weight/illlumination), ‘fly’ (insect/travel in the air), swallow (bird, throat ingest). So for these three pairs the following are used: light/lite, fly/flutter, swallow/gulp. In the case of ‘dub’, a verb, it is used to distinguish it from ‘name’, a noun. This is helpful when conducting searches, to arrive at results without ambiguity.
In summary:
Apirrie, ya andrie, parabara oondrana thana thipie aumanunthoo
abiri, ya andri, barabara undrana Dana Dibi ama nunDu
4th. [commandment]
Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.
father, and mother [with force and strength] think-ing they-all live breast milk
In the 4th Commandment, Apirrie is ‘father’, ya ‘and’ and andrie ‘mother’:
parabara is not so simple:
From Table 15 perhaps the notion: ‘father and mother big (i.e. with force and power)’ can be derived.
Then, as this Commandment appears to be clearly the one about ‘honour(ing) thy father and thy mother’, the following three words oondrana thana thipie are likely to be related to “days may be long”.
Thus ‘(you must) think they (might) live’ …
The final word(s) aumanunthoo seem to be ‘breast’ and ‘milk’.
In summary then, and simplified, this might be:
father and mother strong(ly) think they might live breast milk
Watta yoondroo narrie nundrala
wada yundru nari nundrala
5th. [commandment]
Thou shalt not kill.
no you dead/corpse dead-towards
In the 5th Commandment, the first two words, wada yundru, are ‘no thou’, for ‘Thou shalt not’.
The next two words, narrie nundrala, for ‘dead strike’, represent ‘kill’.
‘No thou dead strike’: or ‘Thou shalt not kill’.
Watta yoondroo pulakaunchie
wada yundru bula gandyi
6th. [commandment]
Thou shalt not commit adultery.
no you desire [?] certain
The 6th Commandment begins in the same way, with ‘no thou’. This is followed by the word(s) pulakaunchie.
From Table 20, ’bula’ seems to convey the idea of advancing or promoting an idea, thus imploring, or doing what lobbyists might do in modern times, seeking to obtain an outcome. Hence the word ‘desire’, and the summary: ‘thou shalt not desire’ … someone else’s wife/woman being implied.
‘gandyi’ at the end is an emphatic: ‘certain(ly):
A similar emphatic, ‘gangayi’, was recorded by William Dawes in faraway Sydney in around 1790:
Watta yoondroo kooriekaunchie
wada yundru guri gandyi
7th. [commandment]
Thou shalt not steal.
no you thief certain
The 7th Commandment likewise begins with ‘no thou’, and concludes with the same emphatic ‘gandyi’. The only new word is ‘guri’, meaning ‘thief’, and ‘steal’.
This is the Commandment ‘Thou shalt not steal’.
Watta yoondroo kurna komanelie, caukooelie ulchulchamuna
8th. [commandment]
wada yundru gurna gumanili, gaguwili uldyuldyamuna
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
no you(r) man own friend nothing-of threaten-ing.
The 8th Commandment repeats the ‘no thou’,beginning. The next three words are kurna komanelie, caukooelie. While there are several examples of ‘gurna’ for ‘man’ there is only one for Koomanlie, which is reproduced in Table 24, meaning ‘own friend’. The third word of this group, caukooelie, occurred in the 3rd Commandment above, and was taken to be a misprint for Baukooelie, with the meaning ‘nothing’.
The final word(s) ulchulchamuna has only a single record, ‘threaten’. A similar word, ‘ulgadya’, has a similar meaning. The third example in the table for comparison, is also similar though less so.
This Commandment might be summarised as ‘do not nothing (i.e. anything) to threaten (your) your own man/friend’.
Watta yoondroo bootoo thoola milkirrana ya, noa thoola watta yoondroo milkirrana baukooaumanuntho
wada yundru budu Dula milgirana ya, nuwa Dula wada yundru milgirana bagu wama nunDu
9th. [commandment]
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.
no you property stranger eye-xxx (covet) and, spouse stranger no you eye-xxx nothing breast milk
The same ‘no thou’ formula begins the 9th Commandment.
The next two words ‘buDu Dula’ each have three possible meanings. However, in the context of this Commandment about coveting things, ‘property’ and ‘stranger’ seem the most likely’ interpretations.
The next word, milkirrana, occurs twice. It is based on the word milki, ‘eye’, and is given as meaning ‘coveting, desiring’. So far the Commandment can be taken to mean ‘do not covet stranger(’s) property.
‘nuwa’ is next, meaning wife or husband, and in the case of this Commandment, ‘wife’.
Other words from the Commandment recur, as well as others met earlier, and the whole might now be summarised as follows:
The phrase ‘breast milk’ was met first in the 4th Commandment where it might have represented ‘upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.’
In the 9th Commandment it might have represented ‘any thing that is thy neighbour’s’. Perhaps it was used as a metaphor for ‘bounty’.
Dieri language
Samuel Gason might have been to first to record the Dieri language but others were to follow.
The first of these might have been a 41-page ‘reading book’ entitled Wonini-pepa Dieri-jaurani Worapala, by J, Fliert, who had joined the Lutheran Hermannsburg missionary group in 1878. (FLIERT, J. (1883) Wonini-pepa, Dieri-jaurani. First Reading Book in the Dieri Language, Adelaide, E, Spiller.)
The next was a major undertaking that came about in the following manner. A Lutheran Mission backed by the Hermannsburg Mission Society in Germany was set up in 1867 on Cooper Creek, first at Lake Hope in Dieri Aboriginal country, only to move repeatedly during that year and the next first to Lake Koperamanna where they joined a group of Moravian missionaries, then to Lake Killalpaninna a little to the west, and then in 1871 to Mundowna Station 100 km further south. Two years later in 1873 they were back near where they started, at Bucaltaninna. Some of the missionaries stayed there for five years.
In 1874 the Hermannsburg group moved about 800 km to the north west, to New Hermannsburg to the west of Alice Springs. Four years later they returned to Killalpaninna where they stayed until the mission closed in 1915. It was in this final period in Killalpaninna that the main work on the Dieri language took place, by missionary J.G. Reuther who was there from 1888 to 1906, and then with Carl Strelhow from 1892 to 1894, yielding the translation of the New Testament into Dieri. According to Wikipedia, this 350-page complete translation of the New Testament into Dieri in 1897 was the first for an Aboriginal language. The Biblical translating done for the Hunter River-Lake Macquarie language (Awabakal) in the 1830s by L.E, Threlkeld was confined to the gospels of Sts Luke, Mark and part of Matthew, together with a number of other isolated verses, and prayers.
A fourth significant source is a handwritten anonymous 65-page vocabulary in a notebook entitled German ‘Vocabulary of native tribes North East South Australia’. This is held in the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, viewable on filmstrip CY4264 and also online at <https://digital.sl.nsw.gov.au/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=FL807761&embedded=true&toolbar=false>. The original forms part of a ‘parcel of MSS originally inscribed [Herbert] Basedow material MSS and Typescript Aborigines. Originally received (by Mitchell Library) 15 March 1934’ [library record for CY Reel 4264]. The folder amongst these papers in which the notebook occurs, Folder 2, is dated ca 1989-1932, and it notes the vocabulary is not in Basedow’s hand. In fact, partly because the vocabulary translations are in German it was most likely the work of one of the Lutheran Hermannsburg missionaries, either J.G. Reuther or C. Strelhow, probably in the period 1888-94.
Finally, of the historical undertakings to record the language, in 1908 an 11-page grammar of Dieri, in German, by W. Planert, was published. (PLANERT, W. (1908) Dieri Grammatik, Dietrich Reimer Verlag GmbH.)
Considerably later, reflecting modern scholarship, the following book appeared:
AUSTIN, P. (1981) A grammar of Diyari, South Australia, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Jeremy Steele
Wednesday 18 August 2021