{"id":3599,"date":"2007-07-16T09:00:39","date_gmt":"2007-07-16T09:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2007\/07\/nameless-named\/"},"modified":"2011-02-05T07:47:05","modified_gmt":"2011-02-05T07:47:05","slug":"nameless-named","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2007\/07\/nameless-named\/","title":{"rendered":"Nameless named"},"content":{"rendered":"

A nice reversal: Mount Nameless<\/a> has got its name back<\/a>. The Western Australian Government has adopted dual naming guidelines<\/a>. (The good people of the Geographic Names Boards. Hurrah hurrah!) The Shire of Ashburton agreed to the mountain being called both Mount Nameless<\/b> (apparently this name was bestowed by a Hamersley Iron survey team in the early 1960s), and Jarndunmunha<\/b>, the name used by the Eastern Guruma people. (The people are also known as Kurrama<\/a>*).
\n[Further update, you can see a picture of Jarndunmunha\/Mount Nameless and more discussion at
\nFilipiniana & Cunning Linguistics<\/a><\/b>.]
\n[ further to further update<\/b>, Piers Kelly has sent a photo of the long long view from the top<\/a> [.jpg]]
\nThe Western Australian Lands Minister, Michelle Roberts, is quoted as saying:
\n“There are probably hundreds of traditional Aboriginal names, virtually unknown by the general community, for features such as mountains, lakes and rivers that currently have a well-known European name.”
\n‘Hundreds’? Wrong ball-park.<\/p>\n


\nLook at (publicity alert!) The Land is a Map: Placenames of Indigenous origin in Australia<\/a><\/em> (TLM<\/em>). For some language groups hundreds of placenames are recorded; for others, more than 3,000 are recorded (e.g.Peter Sutton’s work on Cape York). How many place-names are recorded depends on the topography and the recorder, and on how long the Indigenous people have endured colonisation. But even in the desert country, there can be thousands of names recorded – as in the 1904 map of north-eastern South Australia prepared by Henry Hillier which contains nearly 2,500 place-names from at least fourteen different language groups (see Philip Jones’ paper in TLM<\/em>).
\nAnd then there’s the pronunciation. Sigh. The ABC reported<\/a> that the Member for the Central Kimberley-Pilbara, Tom Stephens, says it will provide a challenge in pronunciation for the town. Unfortunately the ABC report gave Joe Reader\/Listener no clue as to how the name is to be pronounced. In restoring names from Indigenous languages, it is crucial that the public be shown from the start how to pronounce the names – otherwise speakers will be distressed by mispronunciations (and then they often blame the spelling system and the linguist…). See Nick Reid’s article in TLM<\/em>.
\n[UPDATE: See Sally Dixon’s comment<\/a>, for how to pronounce it – thanks Sally!<\/b>]
\nTom Stephens’ heart’s in the right place though:
\n“I’m sure that the township will view this with great interest and it will be a source of great comment and no doubt some fun, but some real opportunities to embrace, I think it’s a real display of a commitment to reconciliation.”
\n* FOOTNOTE<\/b>
\nThere’s a book with information on Guruma land and language, The Guruma story = Guruma-yharntu wangka<\/em><\/a>: IAD Press, 2001, told by the Guruma Elders Group, led by Peter Stevens, and collected and edited by Loreen Brehaut and Anna Vitenbergs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A nice reversal: Mount Nameless has got its name back. The Western Australian Government has adopted dual naming guidelines. (The good people of the Geographic Names Boards. Hurrah hurrah!) The Shire of Ashburton agreed to the mountain being called both Mount Nameless (apparently this name was bestowed by a Hamersley Iron survey team in the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-australian-linguistics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3599"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3599\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4339,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3599\/revisions\/4339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}