(=)garda and (=)barda and =arda

Oh dear. So… there are many reasons that I am very fond of Bardi, but it’s a rather frustrating language sometimes. This ranks pretty highly in both coolness and frustratingness.
There are a few ways of forming questions in Bardi. One is to use interrogative intonation. That’s a really wimpy way. The second is to stick [...]

Syntax … the mystery continues

It was a day full of discovery today. I found a sound more painful than chalk on a blackboard (fork on frozen creamed corn…) and there was some new syntax.
Bardi has a lot of morphology that isn’t very productive. The case morphology is very regular but there’s a heap of derivational marking that occurs pretty [...]

More syntactic mysteries

Another excellently puzzling syntactic day today.
I’d been having trouble eliciting examples of gerunds with ’source’ case marking. They are mentioned in Nekes and Wurms’ Nyulnyul materials but I didn’t have any examples, and the examples I tried didn’t work. Somehow I got the idea that these forms might be resultative (I’m not sure if this [...]

Glossing

I have to bite the bullet now and decide how to interlinearise my Bardi examples in the grammar. Most of my corpus isn’t interlinearised. I don’t need it, and I’ve been avoiding this for a while because there’s no good solution that I can see. These are the issues:

rampant post-affixal morphophonology (harmony, epenthesis, etc) which [...]

warrgam ngandan…

just working-working, not much else to report at present, besides some wildlife and tamelife. I thought the snakes all came out in October, but I must be wrong about that given the number of baby king browns at the moment (seen one a day for 4 days now). I’m pretty sure that the gap under [...]

Syntactic intrigue…

An intriguing session today*, in several ways. I was doing straightup elicitation and translation, which in itself is surprising since that hasn’t been very successful in the past, but it was working extremely well today.
Second, I got confirmation of the obviation (or better to call it quasi-obviation). Bardi has this thing where there are two forms [...]

Cancellable predicates

An off-chance English comment about ‘drowning’ led to an opportunitistic question or two. It turns out that Bardi has the same sort of cancellable semantics in certain predicates that have been reported for some Asian languages.
For example, in English, the sentence “He killed the dog, but it didn’t die” cannot be true in any [...]