{"id":3649,"date":"2007-12-09T18:13:15","date_gmt":"2007-12-09T18:13:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2007\/12\/the-hy-phen-at-port-jackson\/"},"modified":"2011-02-05T07:34:03","modified_gmt":"2011-02-05T07:34:03","slug":"the-hy-phen-at-port-jackson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2007\/12\/the-hy-phen-at-port-jackson\/","title":{"rendered":"The hy-phen at Port Jackson"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nMark Liberman’s post at Language Log ‘On
\nthe origins of ‘American Indian hyphens’<\/a> (with updates) locates
\n“the practice of writing American Indian words — especially proper
\nnames — with multiple internal hyphens” in the 19th century.  The
\nearliest usage Mark has found so far is in an 1823 publication about an
\n1819-20 expedition across the USA.<\/p>\n

\nHere in Australia, by about 1791 hyphens between
\nsyllables were common when the Sydney Language was being
\nwritten down by the English colonists (who had arrived in 1788).<\/p>\n

\nA good example is David Collins’ list near the end of his 1798 An account of the
\nEnglish colony in New
\nSouth Wales<\/i><\/a> (pp.407-413 in 1975 edition; at “What
\nfollows is
\noffered only as a specimen, not as a perfect vocabulary of their
\nlanguage”).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
NAMES CHIEFLY OF OBJECTS OF SENSE<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
NEW SOUTH WALES<\/u><\/td>\nENGLISH<\/u><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Co-ing<\/td>\nThe sun<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Yen-na-dah<\/td>\nThe moon<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Bir-rong<\/td>\nA star<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Mo-loo-mo-long<\/td>\nThe Pleiades<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
War-re-wull<\/td>\nThe Milky Way<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Ca-ra-go-ro<\/td>\nA cloud<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
[etc]\n<\/td>\n\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Collins regularly uses intersyllabic hyphens also in his ‘A short
\nvocabulary of the New Zealand language’ (sc. Māori) in the same
\nvolume.
\nThe practice might be more common where vernacular
\nwords are used in English running text, such as:<\/p>\n

That they have ideas of a distinction between good and bad
\nis evident
\nfrom their having terms in their language significant of these
\nqualities. Thus, the sting-ray was (wee-re) bad; it was a fish of which
\nthey never ate. The patta-go-rang or kangaroo was (bood-yer-re) good,
\nand they ate it whenever they were fortunate enough to kill one of
\nthese animals. (Collins
\nAppendix I<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nNote that the Sydney Language words they were
\nrecording are generally monomorphemic and I think it is safe to say
\nthat the writers realised this by the time they made up their
\nlists.  John Hunter’s vocabulary, partly copied from Collins, uses
\nintersyllabic hyphens in only some of the words, and in others seems to
\nuse a hyphen to separate morphemes (1793, An historical
\njournal of the
\ntransactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island<\/i><\/a>, Chapter
\n15).  A third possible pattern in Collin’s practice is that a
\nhyphen precedes a syllable
\nwith secondary stress.<\/p>\n

\nAnother First Fleeter, Watkin Tench, uses hyphens when
\nfocussing on the syllables, such as in<\/p>\n

June, 1791. On the second instant, the name of the
\nsettlement, at the
\nhead of the harbour, Rose Hill, was changed, by order of the governor,
\nto that of Par-ra-màt-ta, the native name of it. <\/i>(Watkin
\nTench 1793 A complete account of the settlement
\nat Port Jackson<\/i>, Chapter 15<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Tench has an interesting phonetics remark, in which he uses a
\nhyphen to separate units which would help an English reader better
\napproximate the target phonetics:<\/p>\n

Not only their combinations, but some of their simple
\nsounds, were
\ndifficult of pronunciation to mouths purely English. Diphthongs often
\noccur. One of the most common is that of a e<\/i>, or perhaps, a i,
\npronounced
\nnot unlike those letters in the French verb haïr<\/i>, to hate.
\nThe letter y
\nfrequently follows d in the same syllable. Thus the word which
\nsignifies a woman is Dyin<\/i>;
\nalthough the structure of our language requires us to spell it Dee-in<\/i>.
\nWatkin
\nTench 1793 A complete account of the
\nsettlement at Port Jackson<\/i>, Chapter 17<\/a> *<\/sup>
<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nI infer that Tench means here (by “the structure of our language”) that
\nEnglish orthography would suggest the wrong pronunciation were the
\nword written Dyin<\/i>, namely as a disyllable like dying<\/i>,
\nand he can avoid that by writing Dee-in<\/i>.  Perhaps Tench
\nalso wanted to represent a disyllable, or bimoraic
\nsyllable: Dawes wrote this word as “Deeyin ‘Woman or
\nwife'”.  Note that this Sydney
\nLanguage
\nword was borrowed into NSW English as gin<\/i>,
\nassimilated as a
\nmonosyllable with short vowel (rather than, say, jean<\/i> with long
\nvowel).<\/p>\n

\nLt
\nWilliam Dawes<\/a>, the best recorder, did not use hyphenation this way,
\nas can be seen in the facsimile
\nsample from his notebook illustrating HRELP’s Dawes online.<\/a><\/p>\n

\nThe first vocabularies recorded in Australia were Cook’s<\/a>
\nand Banks’<\/a>
\nlists taken down at Endeavour River in 1770.  Those did not use
\nhyphens.  They are similarly absent from the 1777 vocabulary
\nrecorded for Cook by his surgeon Mr Anderson at Adventure Bay
\n(Tasmania), at least as
\npublished in 1821<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\nSo, we are hardly any
\ncloser to understanding “the
\norigins and spread of this orthographic practice”<\/a>, but it seems to
\nhave arisen in the late 18th century and continued through the 19th
\ncentury.<\/p>\n

\n

* Note: I quote from the 1961
\nAngus & Robertson edition Sydney’s
\nfirst four years<\/i> “With an
\nintroduction and annotations by L.F. Fitzhardinge”. The online version
\nof Tench drops the intersyllable hyphens (and simplifies in other
\nways); it might be truer to the 1793 edition which I haven’t checked,
\nbut for now I trust Fitzhardinge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark Liberman’s post at Language Log ‘On the origins of ‘American Indian hyphens’ (with updates) locates “the practice of writing American Indian words — especially proper names — with multiple internal hyphens” in the 19th century.  The earliest usage Mark has found so far is in an 1823 publication about an 1819-20 expedition across the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"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-3649","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\/3649","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\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3649"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4063,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3649\/revisions\/4063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}