🚀 go-pugleaf

Ananke wrote:
> 
> "John Atkinson" <johna@bigpond.com> wrote:

> >"Ananke" <FarrallNO@SPAMdingoblue.net.au> wrote
> >>
> >> It just got worse ;-)  How about words for 'blue' or 'sky'?  He is blue,
> >> afterall.  This is the page I was using to refer to areas and histories...
> >> http://www.dnathan.com/VL/byLang.htm  Can't find much Warrung stuff at all
> >:-(
> >
> >Just about all that's been recorded is collected by Barry Blake in
> >"Woiwurrung, the Melbourne language" in vol 4 of "The Handbook of Australian
> >Languages", ed RMW Dixon and Blake, Oxford, 1991.
> >
> >For other extinct and near extinct Victorian languages, a good reference is
> >Louise Hercus "Victorian Languages, a Late Survey" (Canberra: Pacific
> >Linguistics, 1986; earlier edition, Australian Institute of Aboriginal
> >studies, 1969)
> 
> It's a crying shame.  Apparently they even had their own taxonomies for the
> animals they knew, all lost.
> 
> >As you know, Woiwurrung divides into two dialects (among others), Woiwurrung
> >("the Melbourne Language") and Thagungwurrung ("the Goulburn River
> >Language), the division apparently lying along the Great Dividing Range.
> 
> How curious.  A reference I use for native rat names is "Australian names for
> Australian rodents", published by the Australian Nature Conservation Agency and
> the CSIRO.  I've found it fascinating, not only for the info and names of native
> rodents, but also the history and pronunciations.  My main interest is the rats,
> but I can see myself being slowly but surely dragged into the whole anthropology
> scene.
> 
> The languages mentioned in the paper include Peek Warrung, Woiwarrung and Wada
> Warrung.

IIRC, the others you mention were around the bay, south of Woiwurrung. 
But see Blake, who discusses the various names that have come down to
us, in particular which were "language" names, and which were groups
named after the locality where they hung out, or whatever.  Most of the
language that got recorded was apparently either Woiwurrung or
Thagungwurrung though.

>  Unfortunately our local library has bugger all in the way of
> information, but I can see the librarians being enthusiastic about being given
> long lists of references to transfer in.  (Anthropology and language -after- the
> maths.)
> 
> >Here's some words from Blake:
> >
> >black, blue:  wurrgurdin (W only), wurrga(rra)bil (both W and T)
> 
> I understand the rr needs to be rolled substantially,

Yep, that's the case in most Australian languages

 but how does the r affect

> the g

not much, probably (you mean rr, I presume -- /r/ and /rr/ are different
phonemes)

>, is the g soft or hard

"hard" (like in "got")

> and which syllable has the emphasis?

Can't remember if Blake was able to deduce any rules for stress in this
language, but most east coast languages seemed to have:

(1) Stress the syllable with a long vowel; if all vowels short, then
(2) for roots with 3 syllables, stress the second syllable; else
(3) put primary stress on first syllable.

Other languages had stress on first syllable even for roots with odd
numbers of syllables.

But you have to remember that just about all we have for this language
is old wordlists (and a little grammar) written down in the nineteenth
century by people with little or no linguistic expertise.  Some of them
(like the famous Robinson) were little more than semi-literate even in
English.  

So the spellings Barry Blake gives are usually no more than his best
guess for a word which, if it exists in more than one list, tends to be
spelt differently in each.  He has proposed a phoneme list for the
language based on those of other better-known languages in the region. 
I suspect he's got the consonants pretty right, but he's been unable to
determine whether there were vowels /e/ and /o/ (and/or, possibly,
schwa) in addition to the obvious /a/, /i/, /u/.

John.