Nyangumarta - English Dictionary. English - Nyangumarta Wordlist and Topical Wordlists

237 Pages·4.941 MB·Australian-English

by  Geytenbeek Brian.

NN
YYAANNGGUUMMAARRTTAA

NN -- EE DD
YYAANNGGUUMMAARRTTAA NNGGLLIISSHH IICCTTIIOONNAARRYY
EE -- NN WW
NNGGLLIISSHH YYAANNGGUUMMAARRTTAA OORRDDLLIISSTT
TT WW
AANNDD OOPPIICCAALL OORRDDLLIISSTT
22000088

BBRRIIAANN GGEEYYTTEENNBBEEEEKK

Nyangumarta - English Dictionary
English - Nyangumarta Wordlist
and Topical Wordlist
2008

Important Note on Taboo Words
This dictionary will contain some words that are not spoken by present language speakers, as
the word is taboo. This taboo is due to the word being the name of, or sounding like the name
of, someone who has passed away.
Some words considered culturally sensitive by the Nyangumarta community have not been
included in this book.

© Intellectual copyright remains with the Nyangumarta people
© Wangka Maya Pilbara Aboriginal Language Centre on behalf of the Nyangumarta people 2008
© Brian Geytenbeek’s original research and data analysis belongs to him and the Summer Institute of
Linguistics (SIL)

First published in 2008 by Wangka Maya Pilbara Aboriginal Language Centre, a non-government
organisation working towards the recording and preservation of the Pilbara region’s Indigenous
languages.

Wangka Maya received financial assistance from the Department of Communication, Information
Technology and the Arts for the production of this book.

All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or
review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this publication may be reproduced by any
process whatsoever without the written permission of the authors, artists and publisher.

Produced by Albert Burgman for Wangka Maya Pilbara Aboriginal Language Centre.

ISBN 1-921312-06-8

Bibliography
1. Nyangumarta - Language 2. Nyangumarta (Australian people) - Western Australia - Pilbara

WANGKA MAYA Pilbara Aboriginal Language Centre
Address: PO Box 2736, South Hedland WA 6722 AUSTRALIA
Ph: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
Email: [email protected]
Website: www.wangkamaya.org.au

Contents
A. INTRODUCTION – A LAYMAN’S LOOK AT NYANGUMARTA ........................I
Basic Intention in Writing this Introduction ....................................................................................................... i
Acknowledgements and Copyright ..................................................................................................................... ii
Nyangumarta Language and its Speakers ......................................................................................................... iv
Geographical Notes ........................................................................................................................................... iv
Historical notes .................................................................................................................................................. iv
Differences between the two major groupings of dialects ................................................................................. iv
An Inland Nyangumarta Dictionary ................................................................................................................... v
Words from other languages .............................................................................................................................. vi
Synonyms .......................................................................................................................................................... vi
B. ALPHABET AND PRONUNCIATION GUIDELINES FOR ABORIGINAL
LANGUAGES IN THE EASTERN PILBARA ........................................................... VI
General Pronunciation Guidelines .................................................................................................................... vii
Vowels .............................................................................................................................................................. vii
Consonants ....................................................................................................................................................... vii
Stress ............................................................................................................................................................... viii
The "kur" rule .................................................................................................................................................. viii
A note regarding the loss of contrast between alveolar and retroflexed consonants ....................................... viii
A possible source of the modern confusion, involving 'jirni' vs. 'jini' and 'pirni' vs. 'pini' ................................. ix
Technical Terms and Abbreviations ................................................................................................................... x
Grammatical terms and other items, and their Abbreviations ............................................................................ x
C. INTRODUCTION TO THE CONCEPTS OF GRAMMAR................................ XII
"Slots" and "Fillers" .......................................................................................................................................... xii
"Word Classes" and "Case-Marking" ............................................................................................................ xiii
Case systems .................................................................................................................................................... xiv
Is the Possessive (or "genitive") a full-sized case, or only half a case? ....................................................... xiv
The double-dealing Dative -- is it sometimes a real Possessive? ................................................................ xiv
The chart of the two types of Pronouns gives a good over-view of how "Case" works .............................. xiv
Ambiguity and how to work out who did what to whom ............................................................................. xv
D. NOUNS .......................................................................................................... XVI
Nyangumarta Pronouns and Demonstratives ................................................................................................ xvii
Pronouns ......................................................................................................................................................... xvii
Vowel Harmony and Stress Patterns as they affect the person-markers ..................................................... xvii
'Nominative' free form pronouns as used for an intransitive action ........................................................... xviii
Chart Showing the 'free-form' and 'bound-form' Pronoun Equivalents ..................................................... xviii
E. ADJECTIVES ................................................................................................. XX
Deictic Adjectives ................................................................................................................................................ xx
Descriptive Adjectives (usually just known as Adjectives) ............................................................................ xxi
Derived Adjectives ............................................................................................................................................. xxi
F. VERB CLASSES AND INFLECTIONS ......................................................... XXI
Two Verb Classes .............................................................................................................................................. xxii
Morpho-phonemic Rules and "Vowel Harmony" ........................................................................................... xxii
Regular -- NYI class ...................................................................................................................................... xxiii
Zero Morphemes ........................................................................................................................................ xxiii
Regular -- RNA class ..................................................................................................................................... xxiv
Examples of verbs marked for Non-Future with various sets of person-markers .......................................... xxiv
(a) Person-markers in Intransitive verbs .................................................................................................... xxiv
(b) Person-markers in Transitive verbs, and the order in which the person-markers occur ........................ xxv
Allomorphs of the Irrealis ("Future") morpheme /-lama/ ......................................................................... xxvii
The Five Verbalisers ...................................................................................................................................... xxix
Chart of the Verb Suffix Orders ...................................................................................................................... xxx
How to read the above chart ..................................................................................................................... xxxii
List of all the verb suffixes ........................................................................................................................... xxxii
Chart of the two regular verb classes ............................................................................................................ xxxii
Outline of regular Nyangumarta NYI class verb milpa- 'come' ................................................................ xxxii
Outline of regular Nyangumarta RNA class verb wirla- 'hit' ................................................................... xxxiii
The Five Irregular Verbs .............................................................................................................................. xxxiv
Chart of the five irregular verbs .................................................................................................................... xxxv
Outline of irregular Nyangumarta verb ya- 'go' ........................................................................................ xxxv
Outline of irregular Nyangumarta verb ma- 'get' ..................................................................................... xxxvi
Outline of irregular Nyangumarta verb ka- 'carry / take / bring' ............................................................. xxxvii
Outline of irregular Nyangumarta verb yi- 'give' ..................................................................................... xxxix
Outline of irregular Nyangumarta verb nga- 'eat' ........................................................................................... xl
Remote Past suffix ( l, +/- -pa ~ -pi), 'long ago' ........................................................................................... xlii
Potential Mood -- a Two-part Discontinuous Morpheme ...........................................................................xliii
Transitivity, and the Case-Marking Requirements of Individual Verbs .........................................................xliii
Free forms ................................................................................................................................................... xliv
Bound forms ............................................................................................................................................... xliv
Formula 1: NOM nom ................................................................................................................................ xliv
Formula 2: NOM nom-dat DAT ................................................................................................................. xliv
Formula 3: NOM nom-loc LOC .................................................................................................................. xlv
Formula 4: ERG erg-dat DAT ..................................................................................................................... xlv
Formula 5: ERG erg-loc LOC ..................................................................................................................... xlvi
Formula 6: ERG erg-acc ACC .................................................................................................................... xlvi
Formula 7: ERG erg-acc ACC ACC ........................................................................................................... xlvi
Formula 8: ERG erg-acc ACC DAT .......................................................................................................... xlvii
Formula 9: ERG erg-loc LOC ACC .......................................................................................................... xlvii
Formula 10: ERG erg-acc ACC LOC ........................................................................................................ xlvii
G. ADVERBS ................................................................................................. XLVIII
H. BIBLIOGRAPHY OF LINGUISTIC PAPERS WITH A BEARING ON
NYANGUMARTA ............................................................................................... XLVIII
NYANGUMARTA – ENGLISH DICTIONARY ......................................................................... 1
ENGLISH – NYANGUMARTA WORDLIST .......................................................................... 97
ENGLISH – NYANGUMARTA TOPICAL WORDLISTS ......................................................... 135
Animals .............................................................................................................................................................. 137
Aquatic Life ....................................................................................................................................................... 138
Artefacts Constructions and Personal Objects .............................................................................................. 138
Birds ................................................................................................................................................................... 140
Bodily Functions ............................................................................................................................................... 141
Body Parts and Products ................................................................................................................................. 143
Ceremony and Dreaming ................................................................................................................................. 145
Colour Pattern and Texture ............................................................................................................................ 146
Direction and Location ..................................................................................................................................... 147
Elements ............................................................................................................................................................ 148
Food Cooking and Fire .................................................................................................................................... 150
Grammatical Terms ......................................................................................................................................... 151
Healing Sickness and Ailments ........................................................................................................................ 151
Holding and Transfer ....................................................................................................................................... 152
Impact ................................................................................................................................................................ 153
Insects ................................................................................................................................................................ 155
Interjections ...................................................................................................................................................... 156
Interrogatives .................................................................................................................................................... 156
Manner and Posture ......................................................................................................................................... 156
Mood and Character ........................................................................................................................................ 158
Motion................................................................................................................................................................ 160
Names and Placenames .................................................................................................................................... 162
Number and Quantity ...................................................................................................................................... 162
Particles ............................................................................................................................................................. 162
People and Kinship ........................................................................................................................................... 163
Phrases and Idioms ........................................................................................................................................... 165
Plants ................................................................................................................................................................. 166
Pronouns and Demonstratives ......................................................................................................................... 169
Reptiles and Snakes .......................................................................................................................................... 170
Size Shape and Weight ..................................................................................................................................... 171
Sounds ................................................................................................................................................................ 171
State.................................................................................................................................................................... 172
Stative Verbs ..................................................................................................................................................... 174
Suffixes and Markers........................................................................................................................................ 175
Time ................................................................................................................................................................... 177
Value .................................................................................................................................................................. 177
Vocalising and Thought .................................................................................................................................... 178
A. Introduction – A Layman’s Look at Nyangumarta
Basic Intention in Writing this Introduction
Writing linguistic papers for linguists is a science and an art that requires knowledge and an under-
standing of a vast number of technical terms, and of all sorts of theories, and an ability to use
shorthand formulas that other linguists can understand and benefit from. In the past I have written
some papers that way. Hopefully they are true. Sadly, to the average person they are at least boring,
and probably completely unintelligible. A close friend once said that no-one would need sleeping
tablets if they had a linguistic paper to read at bed-time!

That is not the kind of thing I want to write now. I want to write this as if I am writing a letter to a friend
-- you -- someone who is interested in learning a bit (or a bit more) about Nyangumarta, and how it
works. If there is anything that you don't understand but want to, you can write back and ask me about
it. By writing this as a letter to you I will be able to explain some things in ways that could never be put
into a linguistic paper for publication. The editors have very strict rules about how things must be
expressed if you want them to publish your paper in their journals. You have to do it their way, or they
won't print it.

For over forty years my wife and I have been Field Linguists with the Summer Institute of Linguistics
(S.I.L.). Field Linguists sometimes call themselves OWLs, for "Ordinary Working Linguists". We have
wanted to use what we have learned about linguistics and about the Nyangumarta language in the
past three decades to help the Nyangumarta people themselves to understand their language better.
We have wanted to use it to teach them to read and write in it so that they can enjoy recording their
own and others' experiences in it, in ways that other Nyangumarta people will really appreciate. Being
literate in Nyangumarta will also help them to understand new non-Aboriginal things all around them
better, like the diabetes that can so devastate their lives, or the government messages that they need
to understand, or the thoughts of other people of other cultures. One very satisfying comment that I
once received was when I translated a government explanation of new legislation about Aboriginal
affairs from one page of brief formal English into several pages of clear everyday Nyangumarta, and
tape-recorded it for our elderly community leader. When I asked later if he still had the tape, he said,
"No. I sent it on to the other communities so they could listen to it too. In all my many years as a
community leader, that's the first message from the government that I ever understood!"

I want this letter about the Nyangumarta language to be simple enough for you, as a friend without
any linguistic training, to understand, but I also want you to find it interesting, enjoyable, and maybe
even useful, too. I would like it to be useful to all our Nyangumarta friends, and to our many other
friends in the Pilbara who also speak Nyangumarta even though they themselves may be descended
from speakers of Ngarla or Nyamal or Nyiyaparli or Warnman or Martu Wangka or any other of the
many Pilbara Aboriginal languages. I have found a lot of pleasure in studying Nyangumarta myself,
and in this letter I want to share that pleasure with anyone else who is willing to read it too.

There is a bit of a catch. To do that I will have to introduce some basic linguistic terms at the
beginning, and some more along the way, as I explain how Nyangumarta works. I will try to make that
task as easy as I know how. Once you have grasped them, you will be able to understand better how
to look at the other Pilbara languages, and see how they work too. All of the Pilbara languages are
different from each other (and Nyangumarta especially so), but they do have many cultural and other
background things in common, and they are all very expressive of what it meant to be an Aborigine in
"the old days". Sadly much of the old knowledge and skills of the hunter-gatherer days has been
forgotten by most people already, and the rest is rapidly being forgotten now, and what isn't written
down now will soon be lost. Hopefully this letter, which I have called "A Layman's Look at
Nyangumarta", together with the Nyangumarta Dictionary and Finderlist, will help to preserve an
accurate and useful (though still incomplete) record of the Nyangumarta language for posterity, and
will also encourage speakers of other languages to record more of theirs, too, while there is still the
opportunity.

Brian Geytenbeek, November 2007
Introduction i