“Welcome to this land and welcome to us all”.<\/p>\n
That’s how on 11th March\u00a0 Aunty Margaret Iselin opened the (tenth or eleventh) Australian Languages Workshop<\/a> held this time at the University of Queensland’s Marine Biology Research Station<\/a> on North Stradbroke Island. She grew up on Myora mission, and learned some language from two old grannies. Three years ago she and other elders decided they wanted a dictionary of their language, Jandai. They got Colleen Hattersley involved, and now have a dictionary of nearly 1,000 entries in a good open-source software format, Lexique Pro, which will contribute to its longevity. Aunty Margaret and others of her community plan to publish it along with an audio CD:<\/p>\n We just hope and pray that all this will be lovely with our dictionary coming into the school; it\u2019s my culture that I\u2019m putting to them to make them realise where I\u2019m coming from.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Following that welcome, it was a day full of re<\/strong>‘s: reclaiming, restoring, revitalising, revisiting, reawakening languages.<\/p>\n In the evening I was honoured to launch Fragments of Budderer’s waddy: a new Narungga grammar<\/em> <\/a>(Christina Eira with the Narungga Progress Association, Pacific Linguistics, Canberra 2010.\u00a0 This, give or take a lot of ums and ahs etc, is what I said.<\/p>\n Narungga is the language of Yorke Peninsula, the boot shaped part of South Australia.\u00a0 Narungga people\u00a0 suffered colonisation early and only word lists and small sentence fragments remain, both in written sources and in people’s memories.<\/p>\n When I first saw the title of the grammar, “Fragments of Budderer’s waddy”, I thought it was melancholy, as I imagined shattered pieces of wood in a museum.\u00a0 But that’s precisely what it is NOT.\u00a0 The title actually refers to stones that are what we can see now of an ancestor’s waddy.\u00a0 It’s a lovely title that brings up the image of the language as an enduring part of landscape like the rocks of the ancestral being.<\/p>\n I also like the two meanings of the subtitle of the book: a new grammar of Narungga, and a grammar of new Narungga. It’s a new grammar in that it’s a grammar for today. It\u2019s a grammar of new Narungga in that it is a reconstitution of a language.\u00a0 Narungga people have worked out with Christina ways of creating new words and phrases and sentences that they can use.<\/p>\n In their reclamation paper, Tonya Stebbins and Vicki Couzens described a \u201cglass half-full\u201d approach to language reclaiming, which concentrates on the strengths that the Aboriginal communities bring to language reclamation. Fragments of Budderer’s waddy<\/em> represents more strengths, the achievement that the publication of this book represents, the achievements of Christina and Tania Wanganeen and the Narungga Progress Association.<\/p>\n The first and obvious strength of this book is that it comes from a partnership between community members and a linguist.\u00a0 This has resulted in materials that community members can use easily. And it enriches the book \u2013 so there\u2019s a really nice map of Narungga place-names marked with important properties- old missions, dreaming sites, quarries, fish catching places and so on.<\/p>\n Other strengths that linguists can bring to bear are: data collection, informed data analysis, informed comparison with other languages.<\/p>\n 1.\u00a0 First is the data collection.\u00a0 Narungga was recorded by a variety of people over a hundred years. \u00a0Christina had to bring all these together, and piece together the fragments.<\/p>\n 2.\u00a0 That brings in the data analysis.\u00a0 The old sources are in a variety of spelling systems, and Christina had a lot of work to do making sense of the spelling systems.\u00a0 That means bringing a linguist’s understanding of what the likely mis-hearings are.\u00a0 How does a German hear and write down sounds of Narungga, how does an English man do this?<\/p>\n 3.\u00a0 Then there’s the comparison with other languages.\u00a0 Narungga is closely related to other Thura Yura languages about which more is known, and Christina’s made good use of this in working out the new grammar of Narungga (in both senses).<\/p>\n I ended the launch with one engaging item of new Narungga.\u00a0 graadidja<\/strong> is a word that Narungga people remembered as meaning vain and stuck up.\u00a0 But they wanted a word to say \u2018honoured\u2019 or \u2018proud\u2019, and there was no obvious word. So Christina’s colleague, Tania Wangaeneen, co-opted graadidja<\/strong>. People can now \u00a0say<\/p>\n Ngadlugu burlga graadidja ngadlu warra wanggadja.<\/em><\/p>\n Our elders are honoured that we can now speak.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “Welcome to this land and welcome to us all”. That’s how on 11th March\u00a0 Aunty Margaret Iselin opened the (tenth or eleventh) Australian Languages Workshop held this time at the University of Queensland’s Marine Biology Research Station on North Stradbroke Island. She grew up on Myora mission, and learned some language from two old grannies. … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","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":[11,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-australian-linguistics","category-indigenous-australia-news"],"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\/4961","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=4961"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4961\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4973,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4961\/revisions\/4973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}