Wunderkammer Import Package 2 final release

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The final release of Wunderkammer Import Package 2 is now available for download. Check out the Wunderkammer website for more info. Thanks to everyone who pointed out bugs and made suggestions for improvement. In this release several bugs have been squished and a bit of input validation and some friendlier error messages have been added. … Read more

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Dancing, naming and writing at Alekarenge – Myfany Turpin

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[from Myfany Turpin, our person in the Northern Territory]
Last Sunday I was fortunate to attend the “2010 Ali Curung traditional Dance festival” in the NT organised by the Arlpwe Art and Culture centre. It appeared that the whole community turned out for the show, and staff from DesArt and Winanjjikari Music Centre no doubt worked tirelessly to put on this great event.
I arrived for the second day where a group of about 6 men sang a ceremony described by Geoffrey Small as jarda malya-malya a Warlpiri ceremony that involved a Dreaming track from Yuendumu to Hatches Creek. Following this Fanny Purrurla led Jiparanpa Yawulyu, from Warlpiri country. Then Mona Haywood led the singing of Tyarre-tyarre awelye, joined by Nancy and Trixie. This is a women’s ceremony from the Kaytetye country called Tyarre-Tyarre (more commonly spelt in the Warlpiri orthography, Jarra-Jarra). All three ceremonies had some 20 dancers, both young and old.
In between the ceremonies were break-dancing competitions for children. It took me a moment to adjust to the contrast in music, but not for the children who seamlessly moved from dancing ceremony to break-dancing in ochre. The day also involved spear-throwing and ‘flour’ races.
An interesting feature was the women’s painting preparations that went on outside earlier that day. Instead of singing, a recording of the previous night’s singing (again Mona, Nancy and Trixie) made by one of her relatives, was played on a tape recorder to accompany the painting up. With around 30 dancers to paint up, and Mona being the main singer (and she’s no spring chicken) perhaps this was to give her voice a break before the afternoon’s performance.
The last time a similar event was held at Alekarenge was at the Arlpwe Art and Culture centre opening at 2008. Before then, perhaps not since the Land Claim hearing or Purlapa Wiri in the 1980s. Those who witnessed the ceremonies at these events may have been disappointed yesterday with the numbers of singers. However I think it’s amazing that there is anyone who still knows and sings these ceremonies at all, considering some historical factors, briefly mentioned below.

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New website: Aboriginal Languages Network, Port Augusta

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The Aboriginal Languages Network is a team of teachers and Aboriginal language and culture experts in Port Augusta, South Australia, and is working on language revitalisation and materials development for threatened languages spoken in northern South Australia. Mohamed Azkour at Augusta Park Primary School in Port Augusta, has developed a website of Aboriginal language materials … Read more

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Amurdak inyman alamuniyi wayunan – the Amurdak language is not dead – Robert Mailhammer

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from Robert Mailhammer
14 June 2010
When I started working on Amurdak in 2007, I was told that the last speaker of that language had just passed away. I wasn’t discouraged by that at all, since I had spent virtually all of my previous linguistic life examining ‘real’ dead languages, some of which we don’t even have records of. However, it soon became apparent that it was very frustrating trying to make sense of Amurdak without being able to go to a speaker and ask them about who killed whom in a particular story or what the 2nd person non-singular future tense of a particular verb was, all of which slowed down the investigation of Amurdak considerably.
However, it was known that there was at least one partial speaker of Amurdak, who lived on Croker Island, and who was also an accomplished songman of an Amurdak song series, but I never got a chance to go and work with him.
Then in late 2009, there was some indication that there might be another (partial) speaker of Amurdak in Darwin and there was also some money to go and find out. With the kind and generous help from Bruce Birch, Nick Evans and Sabine Hoeng, supported by the DobeS Iwaidja Documentation Project, plans were made to travel up to Croker Island to firstly help Bruce with some Iwaidja transcriptions and secondly to find out about this ‘new’ speaker, and thirdly see whether I could work with Charlie Mangulda, the Amurdak songman.
When I arrived in Darwin in early May 2010, Bruce and I met up with that potential last speaker and it became quite clear that I wouldn’t get very far. On top of this we received news that Charlie Mangulda wouldn’t be available for consultation, which was particularly disappointing. But we had heard that a relative of one of Bruce’s consultants supposedly could translate the stories from the text collection Rob Handelsmann and I had published a few weeks earlier* and Sabine and Bruce had distributed among the Amurdak-affiliated community into Iwaidja when she listened to the CD. So the plan was at least to see about that.
With Bruce as an extremely generous and kind host and expert mentor I set out on my first fieldtrip…
After the first session with Rae Giribug, the above-mentioned relative, it became obvious that the story was true. Much like a professional interpreter she was translating a 20-year old recording from Amurdak into Iwaidja, one of the local languages. She could say back the words in Amurdak, translate words from Iwaidja into Amurdak and I was even able to ask about specific grammatical forms! So working nearly every day, we managed to transcribe and translate three narratives, which had been previously untouched, and we also filled in some blanks in existing transcriptions. On top of that I started trying out my theoretically and passively acquired Amurdak and by the final day of my stay we had little conversations in a language that I had only known from recordings from last century. We had started the resuscitation of Amurdak as a means of communication!

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Wunderkammer Import Package 2

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The latest version of the Wunderkammer mobile phone dictionary software, Wunderkammer Import Package 2 Beta, is now available for download. The major advance in this distribution is a new easy to use graphical user interface. There’s also a new set of documentation to go with the new user interface. This is a beta release. We … Read more

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Contemporary Aboriginal naming practices

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As I reported in this recent blog post, at least one family in South Australia is still speaking the Dieri (Diyari) Aboriginal language. During our discussions last week I took down a genealogy for seven generations of the family, and noticed something interesting about the names given to children of each generation.
The first generation for which I have information were children born around 1880 (such as Frieda Merrick, born in 1885). Many Dieri at that time were associated with Killalpaninna mission run by German Lutheran missionaries. The English language names given to children of this generation have Biblical and Germanic sources, eg. Frieda, Gottlieb, Timotheus, Katerina, Selma, Alfred and Walter.
Children of the next generation, born around 1900, typically have ‘Anglo’ names that were also common among the non-Aboriginal population at the time, eg. Ben, Ernest, Shirley, Myra, George, Martha, Albert, Suzie. This practice continued for the next three generations, born in the 1920s to 1960s, who had names like Arthur, Rosa, Eileen, Nora, Robert, Joan, Jeffrey, Reg and Ian. By the 1970s other names (also used among the wider population) make an appearance, such as Donica, Trevan, Kyle, Liam, Kristen, Brenton and Michele.
A change seems to have happened in the last 10 years for children born around 2000 and later. The names given to them are all ‘unusual’ in not being ‘typically Anglo’ but rather based on African-American names, especially those of popular black singers and rap artists (with a number of girl’s names ending in -esha). Additionally, names of the current youngest generation are spelled in many unusual ways, with lots of unexpected consonant clusters, and even the use of punctuation in the case of De’Ron. The following are the names I collected:

BillyLee Damelia De’Ron
Iesha Jaima Jaran
Jenola Kaiha Kanolan
Katasha Kyrahn Lailani
Lamiah Latesha Mikayla
Nikkiesha Quandelia Quanesha
Quintella Ronice Shareena
Shekogan Shonesha Sianne
Talesha Trayton Trevan
Tyrelle Vaniah Virion
Zander Zysdonehia

Colleagues living in New South Wales have noticed a similar phenomenon and reported the presence of highly distinctive and unusually spelled names among young Aboriginal children there too. There is clearly a distinctive naming system evolving for some Aboriginal groups, a system with its own dynamics though influenced by exposure to popular US black music culture.

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And still they speak it

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From 1974 to 1978 I worked intensively on Dieri (Diyari), an Aboriginal language spoken in the far north of South Australia, mainly in Port Augusta and Marree. I completed my PhD, which was a descriptive grammar of Diyari, in 1978, and published a revised version with Cambridge University Press in 1981. I later published some texts in Diyari, and in 1988 together with Luise Hercus and Philip Jones published a life-history of Ben Murray, one of our main consultants, in the journal Aboriginal History.
Since 1978, jobs in the US, Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Germany and the UK have kept me busy working on other languages and other topics. My last fieldtrip to South Australia was in 1977. At that time there were about 12 fluent speakers of Diyari, all aged over 50, and in the intervening years all of them have died (Ben Murray passed away in 1994 aged 101). According to the latest edition of Ethnologue Dieri (DIF) is now “extinct”.
This year I am taking my first sabbatical leave since starting work at SOAS over 7 years ago, and have had the opportunity to return to Australia for an extended visit and to start to think about Diyari again. In 2009 I was contacted by Greg Wilson, South Australian Department of Education and Children’s Services (DECS), who told me about a pilot project to introduce the language into schools in South Australia with sponsorship from the Dieri Aboriginal Corporation (DAC) (which just last year purchased Marree Station for the Dieri people – see photos) and financial support from the Australian Federal Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts (DEWHA). For the past year Greg has worked on creating a CD-ROM of basic language materials in Dieri (as the community members prefer to call it) recording words and simple sentences from a number of people in Port Augusta, Whyalla and Adelaide. At the beginning of this year DAC, with DEWHA funding, asked Greg to start a main phase project to develop Dieri language lessons for R-12 students. He had already produced a massive program for the neighbouring Arabana language, using materials from Luise Hercus’ grammar and dictionary, and working with a number of Arabana speakers, however it looked like the same would not be possible for Dieri as the level of language knowledge seemed much more fragmentary.
Last week Greg organised for me to visit South Australia and travel with him to Port Augusta to meet members of the Dieri community, especially Winnie Naylon and Renie Warren, and their children and grand-children. They are sisters, and the grand-daughters of one of my main consultants from the 1970s, the late Frieda Merrick. Frieda was born in 1885 (she passed away in 1978) and had spent her early years at Killalpaninna Mission that was run by Lutheran missionaries and where Dieri was the main language in use. Her husband Gottlieb Merrick had also been involved with the mission. Frieda spoke only Dieri to her daughters, one of whom was Suzie Kennedy, the mother of Renie and Winnie. I once had the opportunity to interview Suzie Kennedy in 1974 but she was very busy with her family and the opportunity to work with her didn’t arise again.
Renie Warren and her son Reg remembered me from my visits to study Dieri with their grand-mother (and great-grand-mother), and once initial shyness had passed, helped along by a few jokes (my saying nhawu parlali nganayi yingkangu and yidni piti thungka nganayi had the whole room in stitches), it turned out that Renie was very fluent in Dieri, easily able to converse and tell stories. She even told me yidni manyu marla yathayi Diyari yawarra ‘You speak Dieri really well’, quite a complement for someone who hadn’t spoken the language for 33 years!
Greg and I got to work on Lesson 1 of the Dieri language program, recording Winnie and Renie, as well as Reg, who is pretty fluent, despite having spent the past 20 years away from Dieri country working on various mining projects (he is currently working as a driving instructor for the massive dump trucks used to cart ore in the Pilbara). Renie’s grandson Robert also joined in with recording bird names.
So, Dieri (Diyari) is not extinct, indeed far from it. The language has been kept alive continuously within this family, and now I have had the pleasure of studying Dieri with five successive generations. In the future I hope to assist Greg and the community with development of further language learning materials.

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