Localisation of linguistic terminology: occagram

There’s a bit of a trend to localise web browsers, software, books and so on for local use. I can get google in Catalan, Kirghiz or Xhosa, and on my trip to Milingimbi last year we were translating parts of speech into Yolŋu Matha.

I reckon it’s time that Australian English was freed from the shackles of Latin grammar. I reckon we should get to use our own terms. Here is a preliminary proposal (which I will, of course, be submitting to the Australian Linguistic Society’s executive committee in due course). I’m on the lookout for coauthors for further advancement of this worthwhile localisation project.

Poncy Latin term	True Blue Occa Term
masculine	blokative
feminine	sheilative
eye-witness evidential	squizzative
vulgar infixation	sledgabloodytive
noun	thing
verb	verb-thing
anachronism	grannitive
malefactive	badative
prefix	pre-thing
super/suprasegmental	fly-spit on the paper(ative)
dubitative	who-knowsative

In the next installment, we will see how productive such a localisation strategy can be. In this case, it has led to the discovery of new grammatical categories!

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