Today’s Laves pick

More translation today. No great earth-shattering discoveries, but plenty of stuff done.

• 25 new words to the dictionary, some of which have glosses, even.
• 5 new place names.
• A nice list of booroo [clan estate] names. This was useful because I didn’t know for sure that all of them *are* clan estates, so that’s nice confirmation of their status. (Place name structure in Bardi is hierarchical but I only fully realised it about 18 months ago and the system is in decline, so for a fair number of names it’s not clear whether they are old estate names or big-name places.)
• A few more examples of rare morphology, including =rra.

Language of the week: Bardi

This is cheating, of course, but since it’s Bardi appreciation week, in my brain at least, and since we’re up to B this time around in the language of the week…

Bardi’s a Nyulnyulan language, spoken right through by about 25 people at One Arm Point and surrounding areas. There are about 1,000 Bardi people. Bardi traditional country is the tip of the Dampier Peninsula, Western Australia, and surrounding islands. It’s a Nyulnyulan language. It’s non-Pama-Nyungan, and there are about 7 other languages in the family.

Bardi is so cool in so many ways I don’t know where to start (let’s just say that the draft reference grammar is 500 pages and growing with no end in sight).

Phonologywise: There are 7 vowels (a, aː, i, iː, u, uː and o). Yes, if you haven’t seen an inventory like that before, that’s because you haven’t seen Bardi. The consonants are standard average Australian, though.

Morphologywise: well, it’s both head and dependent marking in most areas, so there’s both case marking and extensive agreement, and possessive pronouns are marked for both the possessor and possessum. There’s not a whole lot of derivational morphology but there are a bunch of isolated forms, which makes me think either that they’re borrowed words or that that morphology used to be much more productive (or both, depending on the form).

Syntactically, Bardi is nonconfigurational. Now, T. Givón (pers comm, March 2008 ) informs me that he decided in 1979 that nonconfigurationality was a fiction, but I beg to differ, although I agree that some languages which has been called nonconfigurational probably don’t deserve that label. I have systematically failed to find any evidence for constituency beyond a few areas: complex predicates, and “second position”. That is, it’s possible to define the left edge of a phrase and a clause, but just about everything else is up for grabs.

Intonation in Bardi is really interesting. Joyce McDonough and I are starting work on a description based on my previous field recordings, so I can’t tell you anything yet, but stay tuned.

There’s not a whole lot available on Bardi apart from Metcalfe’s 1975 dissertation, an article by Edith Nicolas in AJL 2000, and my papers on my web page.

Last field trip

I suspect that my upcoming trip will be the last I do on Bardi. That’s not certain, of course, but I have a suspicion about it.

That puts the pressure on to make sure I ask all the questions I need to. I have a list of things I don’t understand, don’t know and need to clarify, including the deixis system. Also, I’ve never done frog stories with Bardi people.

So, my question to you all: what do you want to know about Bardi? What sorts of things are you irritated about when you look up a grammar and find they aren’t there?

Multilingual gem

Today’s post is also about Bardi. I now have 50 of the Laves stories fully translated and annotated, and about 30 to go, give or take. I’ve written an export macro that converts the texts to LaTeX for proofing on paper.

I think one of the stories I did this morning is my favourite in the whole collection. It’s an image that’s stayed with me from the initial reading of these stories in 2003. Two guys meet by chance across a chasm. One of the guys asks shouts a question in Oowini across the gap. The other doesn’t answer, because he doesn’t speak that language. He yells back something in a different language, which the Oowini guy doesn’t know. Then they both turn into stone. I’m told that’d the fate of not being able to communicate in such circumstances.

(The rocks can still be seen in this area, I’m told, although I’m pretty sure the cliffs in question are on Curtin Air Force Base so I doubt I’ll get to see them in a hurry.)

Such are the perils of not being able to answer when you’re spoken to in a language not your own…

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.]

New morpheme!

I’m going through the Laves text in preparation for fieldwork in a month or so. I’m doing preliminary translations and making notes about things I don’t understand. I think I’m about halfway through the texts now, but it’s very uneven. There are a bunch of slightly different dialects represented in the text.

In a text today I found a morpheme I’d never seen in Bardi before. Well, actually, I must have seen it before because I think I read this text quickly with people in 2003, but I don’t have any notes on it. Here’s the first part of the text, with my codes explained in [ ]:

L67.001

\lg Goo biindanjina.
\ft Goowa [mermaid] lives in the scrub.
\lnt [Laves' note] biindanjina - customary residence expressed by infinitive
\nq [question] find out more about goowa in general (all previous stories have goowa as a ‘mermaid’ - that is, a sea spirit, not a land spirit.

L67.002
\lg Garda inkal biindan.
\ft She’s still in the scrub.
L67.003
\lg Arramba darr oolara amboorinygan.
\ft She doesn’t come out for people.

All very straightforward. The first line is cool because it shows -a as a predication marker (this dialect has a lot of final vowel dropping and if this weren’t marked for predication it should be biindanjin), and it’s a construction with the possessive that is pretty rare in the modern language.

Line 2 is cool because it has a null-marked locative. It’s not very rare but it’s still nice.

Laves thought line 3 was interesting because the negative is split: arr-amba darr oo-l-ar-a ambooriny-gan. That’s because he thought -amba here meant ‘man’ and it’s a split negation construction, but here -amba (not to be confused with aamba ‘man’) is a discourse clitic and there’s nowhere else it could go. This sentence contains the only example of the morpheme -gan that I’ve seen. The free translation in context must mean ’she [the mermaid] doesn’t come out [of the bush] for people. In that case, -gan might be sort of the equivalent of Standard Modern Bardi -ganiny (the cause/reason suffix). -ganiny itself is without etymology that I know of, but there’s no way to get from -ganiny to -gan without a lot of etymological funny business.

Anggi ngajoogal barnanggarr?

Ngayoo… moodigang bard arr nganjoogal Katy-ngan, moodigangab jina woobijal mayalan. Niimana ambooriny. Ginyinggon garra garra garra I-10-nyarr  bard arr nganjoon … goolngan. Aarlimay nganarligal, milimili nganjal, nganngan nganganka … milimili nganamboona biggestmob. Warrgam nganmankal… warrgam warrgam… Roowil ngannyanggalirr libraryngan milimili, agal nyalab jan baarlingan. Gaari nganibin arinyji.

[What I did today - had to look up two words and neither were in the dictionary. oops. One was how to say 'car' in Bardi; I'm pretty sure it's /mutika/ but moodiga looks really really wrong. The other was 'hospital', which is 'wupthal' in Yan-nhaŋu and isn't in there either.)