Aboriginal Languages Australia

The Lake Macquarie missionary the Rev. Lancelot Threlkeld produced a grammar of the language where his mission was established. This...

THE ANNUAL REPORT OF THE MISSION TO THE ABORIGINES, LAKE MACQUARIE, FOR MDCCCXXXVIII Ebenezer, Lake Macquarie, New South Wales, December...

Body parts are the best documented category of words for many Aboriginal languages because they were the most immediate and most...

Just to the west of Hornsby, a northern suburb of Sydney, is Old Mans Valley. One might reasonably assume that the name was inspired by...

How did this translation come about? An Aboriginal singer-songwriter acquaintance sent an email inviting Your Amateur Researcher (YAR) to...

Meeting some Tasmanians It’s the year 1793, and the place later known as Tasmania. Ten years before the first European settlement to be...

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...