Jeremy Steele
Language Abbreviations used in the Bayala Databases
The following is a typical summary table from the Bayala databases presenting a few of the words for ‘kangaroo’ across the country. The...
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Jeremy Steele
- Dec 18, 2015
- 3 min
TASMANIA Words: 'grub' for grub
Meeting some Tasmanians It’s the year 1793, and the place later known as Tasmania. Ten years before the first European settlement to be...
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Jeremy Steele
- Dec 17, 2015
- 7 min
TASMANIA Words: 'sun'=big eye
It is something of a thrill for Your Amateur Researcher (YAR) when a little bit of the curtain shrouding the mysteries of the Tasmanian...
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Jeremy Steele
- Dec 14, 2015
- 3 min
TASMANIA Words: 'star' shine
The word marama in the Tasmanian word lists caught the attention again today. The meaning given for it is ‘star’. DEEP TIME No-one quite...
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Jeremy Steele
- Nov 23, 2015
- 3 min
TASMANIA Words: white 'feather'
The Tasmanian Bayala database keeps throwing up small insights into the Tasmanian languages, and suggests the launching of a goose chase....
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Jeremy Steele
- Oct 20, 2015
- 5 min
TASMANIA: Having a look at suffixes
Affixes: prefixes, infixes, suffixes — the lot Joseph Milligan, who provided more extensive vocabularies than anyone else, famously...
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Jeremy Steele
- Aug 30, 2015
- 3 min
TASMANIA Words: rana: ‘bone’
Working on the Tasmanian vocabularies Here is a typical fragment of Tasmanian vocabulary: Fig. 1 Extract from the Joseph Milligan list...
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Jeremy Steele
- Aug 19, 2015
- 4 min
TASMANIA: Mistakes in the word lists
Europeans encountered Aboriginal people from before the upheaval that began in 1788. Lists of words were obtained in Botany Bay in 1770,...
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Jeremy Steele
- Aug 9, 2015
- 3 min
TASMANIA Words: 'hair'
Hair? In Aboriginal languages there are often different words for it. Hair on the head, beard, and the not-politely-mentioned pubic hair....
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Jeremy Steele
- Jul 27, 2015
- 4 min
Interpreting the word lists: 'lie' – recline or fib?
For those of us who actually speak English we often fail to see what the difficulties in it are. English seems the simplest of languages:...
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Jeremy Steele
- Jul 19, 2015
- 4 min
TASMANIA Words: tea-leaves at 'sunrise'
Trying to make sense of the Tasmanian language records is difficult, and akin to reading the future from tea-leaf arrangements in a cup....
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Jeremy Steele
- Jul 5, 2015
- 3 min
TASMANIA Words: 'shoulder', 'shellfish', 'bird'
It is very easy to grab the wrong end of the stick. It is very easy to jump to wrong conclusions. Perhaps that is being done here. In the...
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Jeremy Steele
- Jun 30, 2015
- 2 min
TASMANIA Words: playing 'possum'
There is a sequence b–d–n… in the Tasmanian language records. There are many examples of it. Little Here are a few such records: Fig. 1...
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Jeremy Steele
- Jun 17, 2015
- 4 min
TASMANIA Words: hebrew: ‘shin’
N.J.B. Plomley had provided a 10 000 or so long word list of Tasmanian words in: Plomley, N.J.B. 1976. A word-list of the Tasmanian...
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Jeremy Steele
- Jun 17, 2015
- 3 min
TASMANIA Words: 'snake' pain
N.J.B. Plomley has provided a splendid resource for information on the languages of Tasmania, and there probably were several. His book...
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Jeremy Steele
- May 25, 2015
- 6 min
TASMANIA Words: mocha early: 'salt water'
First visit to SOAS Twenty years ago, on Monday 3 April 1995, your Sydney-based amateur researcher into Australian languages called on...
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Aboriginal Languages of Australia
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