Aboriginal Languages Australia

It is something of a thrill for Your Amateur Researcher (YAR) when a little bit of the curtain shrouding the mysteries of the Tasmanian...

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...

One can only surmise what the euphonious NSW place name Trunketabella might mean. We yearn for a translation such as ‘pretty trinkets’,...

The Tasmanian Bayala database keeps throwing up small insights into the Tasmanian languages, and suggests the launching of a goose chase....

Affixes: prefixes, infixes, suffixes — the lot Joseph Milligan, who provided more extensive vocabularies than anyone else, famously...

Working on the Tasmanian vocabularies Here is a typical fragment of Tasmanian vocabulary: Fig. 1 Extract from the Joseph Milligan list...

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...

A friend wrote: “If possible would you email the aboriginal word for butterfly.” Here is the reply: ————————– Thank you for your enquiry...

In an article in the Sydney Morning Herald on 4 February 2015, written by Leesha McKenny, the matter is raised about giving the name of...

Although William Dawes is a splendid resource for understanding the classical Aboriginal language of Sydney Biyal Biyal, there are...

The Anon Notebook gives ‘Cow-wan’ as the name or place of Ross Farm, the farm of Major Robert Ross of the Marines, the Lieutenant...

One of the most noticeable things about guns, when they are used, is that they go ‘bang!’ It is obvious, but we do not think about it...