There is a place on Lake Macquarie, near Newcastle, in New South Wales, called Eleebana. Internet searches result in statements that it is an Aboriginal word meaning ‘place of beauty’. However, there is more to it than that. Eleebana, Lake Macquarie, NSW Lowanna Place, Hornsby, NSW Tangara train, Sydney Fig. 1 Tasmanian words out of place ‘Eleebana’ is not just an Aboriginal word, it is a Tasmanian Aboriginal word and so a long way out of place on Lake

It is not only Your Amateur Researcher (YAR) who finds trying to make sense of the Tasmanian records difficult. Terry Crowley and R.M.W. Dixon wrote in their chapter "Tasmanian" in Handbook of Australian Languages , edited by R.M.W. Dixon and Barry Blake, J., 1981, as follows: on p.420: “The material on Tasmanian is so poor that almost nothing can be inferred with any degree of confidence.” on p.400: “The materials on Tasmanian dialects range from poor to almost non-existent;

Among Australian languages the Tasmanian Aboriginal languages are a special case. The island of Tasmania has been separated from the mainland for perhaps 12 000 years, since the ending of the last ice age. While there is some speculation about whether Tasmanian languages—and scholars estimate there were between half a dozen and as many as twelve—were Australian languages at all, they probably were. Since prior to the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, the Aboriginal people h

What are the Bayala databases? The Bayala databases  are a set of relational databases containing words and sentences in Aboriginal languages from across the country. In the databases, words appear in full and also as broken up into their stem and one or several suffixes (and sometimes prefixes). The databases began simply as lists of Aboriginal words and their corresponding English meanings. Since then they have become increasingly complex, and now provide much more. To give

Meeting some Tasmanians It’s the year 1793, and the place later known as Tasmania. Ten years before the first European settlement to be established. There had been occasional European sightings and visits since 1642, and this was one such, by the French. It was the expedition, under Bruny d’Entrecasteaux, that was looking for the lost explorer La Perouse. They were in Recherche Bay, named after their own ship, on the south-east coast. Fig. 1 Tasmanians in 1793 preparing food,

It is something of a thrill for Your Amateur Researcher (YAR) when a little bit of the curtain shrouding the mysteries of the Tasmanian vocabularies is pulled aside. Take as an example of this the following records for ‘sun’ collected by French sailors in Recherche Bay on 11 February 1793, and again on a second visit two days later: Australian respelt English EngJSM source "panubère" ba-nubiri "{sun}" sun Willaumez [d.1:1:18] [SE] [Tas] [1793] Fig. 1 ‘sun’ according to Willau

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 knows when the last person was able to walk from the Australian mainland to Tasmania. Why it was possible at all was because it was the ice age — or more precisely the last ice age. In fact we are still in the remnants of that ice age, because ice is still piled up, sometimes kilometres thick it is said, in Antarctica. If it all melted, they

The Tasmanian Bayala database keeps throwing up small insights into the Tasmanian languages, and suggests the launching of a goose chase. Your Amateur Researcher (YAR) happened to be checking the word munwaddia , given as meaning ‘feather’. Australian respelt English EngJSM source "munwaddia" mun-wa-dya "[feather]" feather Plomley jj [A610.jj:163:8] [OyB] [Tas] [c.1835] Fig. 1 ‘Feather’ When this word is analysed into what are assumed to be its component parts, in this case

Affixes: prefixes, infixes, suffixes — the lot Joseph Milligan, who provided more extensive vocabularies than anyone else, famously stated about the Tasmanian languages: The affixes, which signify nothing, are la, lah, le, leh, leah, na, ne, nah, ba, be, beah, bo, ma, me, meah, pa, poo, ra, re, ta, te, ak, ek, ik , etc. He further declared: The distinctly different pronunciation of a word by the same person on different occasions is very perplexing, until the radical or essen

Working on the Tasmanian vocabularies Here is a typical fragment of Tasmanian vocabulary: Fig. 1 Extract from the Joseph Milligan list held by the Mitchell Library < http://www.acmssearch.sl.nsw.gov.au/search/itemDetailPaged.cgi?itemID=430548 > It is by Joseph Milligan, in 1857. It features long words. Here is part of what Your Amateur Researcher (YAR) has made of this particular fragment: Fig. 2 Extract from the Tasmanian database, in the Bayala series of Australian language

Europeans encountered Aboriginal people from before the upheaval that began in 1788. Lists of words were obtained in Botany Bay in 1770,...

Hair? In Aboriginal languages there are often different words for it. Hair on the head, beard, and the not-politely-mentioned pubic hair....

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:...

Trying to make sense of the Tasmanian language records is difficult, and akin to reading the future from tea-leaf arrangements in a cup....

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...

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...

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...

N.J.B. Plomley has provided a splendid resource for information on the languages of Tasmania, and there probably were several. His book...

First visit to SOAS Twenty years ago, on Monday 3 April 1995, your Sydney-based amateur researcher into Australian languages called on...