The 4000th Bardi dictionary word
Drumroll… I just added the 4000th headword to the Bardi dictionary. It’s wajarrgi, a little hawksbill turtle. The original dictionary was about 1800 words. There was another draft dictionary, compiled by Toby Metcalfe, with not much overlap in content with the published dictionary, so getting to 3000 words was pretty easy. The file stayed around 3500 for a while before starting to compile stuff from the Laves materials. There’s probably another few hundred headwords sitting in my fieldnotes and the remaining Laves texts. [The headwords don't count all the different complex predicate formations; if we'd included all the preverb-inflecting verb possibilities as different headwords rather than as subentries we'd already be well over 5000.]
This entry was posted on April 17, 2008 at 10:43 am and is filed under Bardi, fieldwork. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.
April 17, 2008 at 12:26 pm
I take it wajarrgi are good to eat, like most endangered species.
April 17, 2008 at 12:45 pm
NI didn’t like them. I didn’t ask the others. They’re ‘muddier’ than the green turtles.
April 18, 2008 at 4:51 pm
I thought Bardi would be a primitive language with only a few hundred words.
Just kidding. Good work Claire.
April 18, 2008 at 7:51 pm
yeah well actually it’s the same 50 words over and over again… they all mean ‘meeting place’.