Ella Archibald-Binge reports for the Guardian on an encouraging development in Australia:
There are several words for “morning” in the Gumbaynggirr language but bambuuda is Anne-Marie Briggs’ favourite. Drawn from bamburr, meaning soft and gentle, it speaks to the quiet moments before sunrise, literally translating as “in the softness”. “Doesn’t it just melt your heart?” says Anne-Marie, sitting at the kitchen table of the Coffs Harbour home she shares with her 12-year-old son, Darruy.
The pair have found an easy morning routine since moving to Coffs three years ago. On a bright spring day Darruy wolfs down his Weet-Bix before strolling across the road to the small independent school that has been making headlines for its unique approach to education on the New South Wales mid-north coast.
When the bell rings, the students converge on a shady sandpit. They stomp bare feet to the click of clapsticks, singing and dancing as the sun gathers warmth. By 9.30am, barely a word of English has been spoken. This is how each day begins at the Gumbaynggirr Giingana Freedom school, the state’s first Aboriginal bilingual school. GGFS opened three years ago amid a broader push to breathe new life into the critically endangered Gumbaynggirr language.
As Indigenous languages decline, Gumbaynggirr is experiencing a resurgence. What began with a handful of elders pooling their pensions to record a few words in the 1980s has led to its revival, to the point where it is once again being spoken in homes and learned by babies.
On a busy Monday morning, Clark Webb, a Gumbaynggirr and Bundjalung man, is treading the school verandas barefoot, his wavy dark hair pushed back by a thick headband. His relaxed demeanour belies the fierce ambition that saw him spearhead the school’s formation as the chief executive of the Bularri Muurlay Nyanggan Aboriginal Corporation.
The corporation wanted to start a bilingual school partly because its members were seeing the education system “fail miserably”, Webb says. Aboriginal families were being blamed for gaps in attendance and academic achievement, he says, rather than schools looking inward at their own deficiencies. […]
Dozens of NSW schools teach Aboriginal languages but this is the state’s only bilingual school. GGFS is open only to Indigenous students from kindergarten to year 8. They attend at least one language class every day and have weekly lessons on country. Some advanced classes are taught almost exclusively in Gumbaynggirr. […]
GGFS opened with 15 students in 2022. Next year there are 95 students enrolled and more on a waitlist. Its goal is to become fully immersive, following the Māori schools model in New Zealand. But the venture has not been without challenges. The first was finding qualified teachers who can speak Gumbaynggirr, which the school solved by finding experts in one field then training them in the other.
Webb says detractors tell him there’s no economic benefit to learning a “dead” language – the kids are better off studying Mandarin or French. They also ask if the children have a sufficient grasp of English. But results speak for themselves. Attendance levels are 88.5%, just above the average rate for all students nationally and far exceeding the national Indigenous attendance rate of 76.9%. […]
One of Muurrbay’s first graduates, Michael “Micklo” Jarrett, is training the next crop of Gumbaynggirr teachers as an Aboriginal language and culture officer at the NSW education department. “When we first started, one of the biggest problems was not enough educators to go into all the schools,” he says. “Now our problem is we haven’t got enough schools for all the educators.”
Jarrett says the quest to save Gumbaynggirr is unending. There are always new words to add to the dictionary: mobile phone (muya-banggi – breath fly); computer (marlawgay-bangarr – lightning brain) and floor (jali-julu – down side), to name a few.
(Gumbaynggirr was mentioned here back in 2006.) There’s lots more at the link, including personal stories and photos; I love this kind of news. Thanks, Bathrobe!
And another encouraging story, this one out of Tasmania: Calla Wahlquist’s The labour of love breathing life back into palawa kani – the lost language of Lutruwita:
[Daisy] Allan frequently speaks in the Tasmanian Aboriginal language, palawa kani, to other TAC staff. It’s part of her job as a language worker and, after 20 years of studying it, she is confident and fluent.
The biggest hurdle when she began learning the language was finding other speakers. Now they’re plentiful. There are language modules for every stage of life, starting with songs to sing a baby in utero. Schoolchildren attend weekly lessons. Resources are available to all Palawa people.
Unlike Allan’s generation and those of her parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, Palawa children today are born knowing the sounds of their language. They are the first to do so for 150 years.
It was sent to me by Andrew Tanner, a (non-indigenous) Tasmanian linguist based in Melbourne now, involved in similar projects with Victorian languages. Thanks, Andrew!
They attend at least one language class every day and have weekly lessons on country. — see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_(Indigenous_Australians)
Thanks — I wondered about that when I read it but then forgot to look it up.
“The lost language” is not an accurate description of palawa kani, as previously discussed here a few months ago, but that’s just the headline; the body of the story explains:
Country_(Indigenous_Australians)
Māori/Polynesian languages have a similar concept ‘motu’ [sense 5], anything separated or isolated. Can mean ‘island’ or group of islands (as in the whole of New Zealand), or something more like ‘our neck of the woods’.
The ‘isolated’ sense came to the fore during the pandemic travel bans.
Speaking of Mandarin…
@ DM
marlawgay-bangarr = 電腦 / 电脑.
Yes, that’s a good one. I assume that marlawgay means both “lightning” and “electricity” in Gumbaynggirr.
I wouldn’t mind trying to learn our local Kabi Kabi/Gubbi Gubbi language, but most efforts at reviving or teaching it seem to stop at mentioning a few items of vocabulary. Which is important, but without grammar is almost meaningless.
Pop-Whorfianism Alert! Do we really think that speakers of a language whose word for morning-or-sunrise derives etymologically from a word for soft-or-gentle have a different conceptual understanding of morning-or-sunrise? It does seem likely that non-native-speakers (such as Ms. Briggs, described later in the article as a “German Australian”) are more likely to be beguiled by Etymological Fallacies because they may consciously notice exotic-seeming-to-them etymologies in a way that native speakers don’t.
In English, of course, we are somehow able to express the notion of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softly,_as_in_a_Morning_Sunrise
Pop-Whorfianism seems to be a hazard of many language preservation/revival efforts. It figures in many reponses to questions about why anyone should take the considerable trouble involved. You tend to come up with bad answers as to why you want to do a good thing when you can’t quite explain your own motives even to yourself.
There also seems to be a very common tendency among people whose ancestral language is seriously endangered or lost to attribute mystical properties to it (of a kind which no human language has ever possessed.) Mystical meanings get fastened particularly on features absent in English (or whatever language it is that these linguistic orphans actually speak in everyday life.)
Even real linguists tend to lapse into it. “If we lose this language, we will lose the unique human perspective regarding …”
While this is obviously not totally fantastical, it is very easy to get carried away by it.
It quite often takes the form of linking death of the language with loss of knowledge of traditional ethnobiology. I suspect this partly reflects the fact that many field linguists are not much good at biology.
Nigel Barley’s The Innocent Anthropologist, based on his time among the Dowayo people in Cameroon, is refreshingly clear-eyed about this kind of thing. He evidently respects his hosts and fascinated by their culture, but points out the essential silliness at the back of some of the Timeless Ancient Wisdom about the Environment stuff. (He reports that the Dowayo were unaware that caterpillars turned into butterflies, for example.)
The “soft or gentle” sunrise, specifically, reads rather like an instance of the etymological fallacy. The words might even be accidental homophones. (I think I could make an argument that Kusaal “lake” derives from “morning” …)
“Archibald-Binge” is a truly excellent name. But it surely calls for a more imaginative given name than “Ella” to go with it.
I think Pulcheria might work.
the essential silliness at the back of some of the Timeless Ancient Wisdom about the Environment stuff
I don’t have the quote handy, but I remember him as saying “The simple fact was that the Dowayo knew less about the wild animals of the African bush than I did.” Which is perfectly reasonable; why should we expect a community of millet farmers to be expert animal trackers?
The thing about Wisdom is that it is very unevenly distributed. It would be very surprising if all remote communities were equally knowledgeable about animal behaviour, or herbal medicine, or the finer points of philosophy; it’s not so surprising that some should far surpass others.
True.
Reminds me of one of the example sentences that I was proffered by the man tasked with coaching foreign doctors in the rudiments of Kusaal:
M nam zi’ nyɛ gbigimnɛ.
“I’ve never seen a lion.”
Not quite sure that this was meant autobiographically, but I don’t suppose he had. Why should he have done?
Whenever I see the song title that JW Brewer references, I want to ask Oscar Hammerstein II what other kinds of sunrises he was familiar with.
A sunrise in the middle of the night or the middle of the day, as in high latitudes?
@DE: I’d think most people in the wealthy countries have seen a lion in person before the age of ten. If your teacher implicitly meant “outside a zoo”, that’s different. Though I’d think a fair number of people from the wealthy countries working in Africa would take the opportunity to go to a park where they can get wild lions for their life list.
David Marjanović, are they noticeably less soft than morning sunrises?
Coming from a high latitude, I can say that the sunrises of lower latitudes are harsh. It’s like daylight is being turned on without warning (and likewise off in the evening). Up here, the sun is lingering just under the horizon for hours, especially around thw solstices, giving that soft halflight of summer nights and winter days.
There are no lions in Norwegian zoos. There are tigers, but only because a zoo population of some size is considered necessary for the survival of the species.
It’s like daylight is being turned on without warning (and likewise off in the evening).
Hence the “swift tropical sunrise/set” of cliché.
And good heavens, that’s conservationist or animal-welfare-considerate of you Norwegians. Though it seems to be not unknown for American zoos to lack lions. Learn something every day.
I’d think most people in the wealthy countries have seen a lion in person before the age of ten
This did not take place in a wealthy country (though Ghana is not dirt-poor, by any means.) To travel to Europe or America is far beyond the financial means of most Ghanaians (at the time I was there, monthly pay for one of our nurses worked out at about 20 US dollars), including well-educated ones, and usually depends on sponsorship from some international organisation.
I’ve never seen a lion in Africa myself either (though I have seen wild elephants. They’re easier to spot …)
The internet advises that lions are definitely currently extant in Ghana in zoos but there is an apparently unresolved debate as to whether there is or isn’t still a very small surviving wild population in or near Mole National Park. But it sounds like the best way for almost any Ghana resident to see one is to visit Accra and go to the zoo. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-62712476
This map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion#/media/File:Lion_(Panthera_leo)_IUCN_range_2023.svg marks what I take it is the region of Ghana where there may or may not still be lions and also the closest spots (along the Ivory Coast’s northern border) where there are more definitely still lions in the wild.
Zoos cooperate worldwide on such things.
I meant the part that surprised me: that Norwegian zoos don’t have lions.
@DE: For some reason that I can’t reconstruct, I was picturing your Kusaal coach as a fellow visitor from a wealthy country, though of course for him to be a Ghanaian makes much more sense.
sondheim decided for theatrical purposes that it was all evening twilight (“perpetual sunset / is rather an unsett- / ling thing”), but his two high-latitude night waltzes could just as easily have been about daylong sunrises:
The Sun Won’t Set
The Sun Sits Low
@J.W.: Thanks for the map. Now I want to know the difference between “Possibly Extant”, “Possibly Extinct”, and “Presence Uncertain”.
The Dagomba royal clan are forbidden from eating lions. The difficulty nowadays may be in finding a lion not to eat, I think.
along the Ivory Coast’s northern border
Isn’t that Benin’s northern border? It’s the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendjari_National_Park
The Ghana-lions-perhaps splodge is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mole_National_Park
(I was told by the rangers that there were still lions there when I visited in the 1990’s, but I never saw any.)
Of course, the principal interest of the Pendjari National Park is that it lies immediately north of where all the Eastern Oti-Volta languages are spoken.
Why waste time looking at boring old lions and elephants when you could be doing fieldwork on Byali or Waama? Or Nõotre, if you’re more into Western Oti-Volta (as so many people are, these days)?
Wouldn’t lions quickly eat up all the moles?
Nah, in this case Mole is an old-fashioned name for Mooré. And as Chomsky has taught us, languages are infinite.
I thought the cardinality of Mole was 6.02 x 10^23.
It would still keep the lions going for quite some time.
My apologies to the staff of the Pendjari National Park – i must have gotten so sidelined by what name to use for the Ivory-Coast-or-French-equivalent that I lost track of what bit of the map it did or didn’t correspond to. I should have said there were still lions along the border between the former Dahomey and the former Upper Volta. That would have avoided confusion.
Personally, I’m quite fond of the name “Upper Volta/Haute-Volta” for its exotic vibe*, though one can see why Thomas Sankara invented a new one. Not a bad creation, either, as made-up country names go.
According to WP, “Benin” was appropriated as the name of the country because it was felt that “Dahomey” was not inclusive enough, referring, as it does, historically only to the Fon southern part of the country (rather as if one were to call Ghana “Akania.”)
Not a brilliant choice of new name though, if you ask me. Geographical and meh, or alternatively confusing and a bit close to being cultural appropriation. Presumably the work of a committee (what with the country being run by Marxist-Leninists at the time.)
* I get a similar kick from the title of Rattray’s Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland. Hey, I used to live there … right by the Mountains of Kong.
If we lose this language, we will lose the unique human perspective regarding …
Well, if we lose Australian indigenous languages we could easily lose a counterargument to Chomskyan tree diagrams, which group sentence components into neat constituent structures. Apparently Australian Aboriginal languages don’t do contiguous constituent structures that Chomskyan analyses tend to regard as universal. That’s one reason I find simple vocab efforts (“the Gubbi Gubbi word for ‘kangaroo’ is ….”) so unsatisfying. I want to see them combined into sentences!
Yes. But people who want/need to believe that having lots of different languages is a useless luxury will think whatever they need to think to justify that belief. (Compare the things people say about the oppressed to justify not doing anything about the oppression.)
Apparently most do, but a few, like Nunggubuyu, really are “non-configurational”.
As I have no doubt said before, I spent some pleasant hours in a subterranean and windowless seminar room back in the spring of ’86 having rambling discussions about whether a particular Chomskyan then-theory about how ergativity worked per Universal Grammar was fatally falsified by how it actually worked (according to Dixon) in Dyirbal.
Dyirbal is possibly the most under-and-over-generalised language family proportional to number of speakers. Maybe rivaled by an Austronesian language from the Philippines that I can’t remember the name of.
The thing about Dyirbal is that it’s not just morphologically ergative, but also syntactically ergative: for example, the absolutive element, rather than the subject, works as what Dixon calls the “pivot” in discourse. That’s substantially less common. Dixon was the first person to lay all this out properly: a lot of his Dyirbal grammar is devoted to the matter. (Ironically, that gives the book a rather 1970’s Chomsky-penumbra vibe.)
I see that he published an updated version a few years ago:
https://academic.oup.com/book/44724
Haven’t read it. Judging by the contents, it seems to go all-in on the syntax particularly.
There’s also the “women, fire and dangerous things” aspect …
It’s not the only example of a small endangered language known only to a few people turning out to be theoretically important because it refutes generalisations made on the basis of SAE and a few pet non-SAE languages, like Japanese. Hixkaryana …
The study of African languages, which certainly strike most laypeople as “obscure”, has contributed quite a bit to general linguistics (for example, in analysing tone.)
Hixkaryana
Wow:
It’s mainly famous for having OVS constituent order.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desmond_C._Derbyshire
a mere SIL field linguist, was apparently at a conference presentation on typology where it was stated that basic OVS order was unattested, and timidly pointed out that his own experience suggested otherwise …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urarina_language
is another: there’s a Mouton Grammar Library grammar of it, by Kurt Olawsky, who (more excitingly) did some work on Dagbani once upon a time.
(I misremembered: it was actually a lecture by Geoff Pullum at UCL, and Derbyshire was a graduate student. Being Pullum, he took the objection seriously.)
https://linguistlist.org/issues/19/1/
I do remember thinking back then that we’d all better hope that Dixon’s description of Dyirbal was *correct*, because we were all at his mercy and not only no one in that seminar room but probably no one at the time at any linguistics department in North America had any independent knowledge of the language. (By chance that seminar that semester also included an Australian grad student who subsequently returned to Australia and had an academic career there, but his research interest was Japonic languages and I don’t think he knew any more about Dyirbal than us Northern-Hemisphereans.)
Dixon sets out his evidence pretty clearly. To dispute what he says, you’d need to maintain, either that he had made up the evidence, or that he had seriously misinterpreted it; in the latter case, you’d need to show just how the misinterpretation had arisen, and offer a better interpretation.
Nevins, Pesetsky and Rodrigues’ response in Language to Everett’s account of Pirahã does in fact lean on the “misinterpretatation” angle primarily, and they do offer their own alternative interpretations of the data. I was quite impressed with it at the time, and still think it makes some valid points (it was only later I found out about the shameful Chomskyite efforts to undermine Everett by actually impugning his integrity.)
I think the main weakness in Everett’s account of Pirahã is his unconvincing attempt to make all the odd linguistic features of the language into consequences of the general cultural attitudes of the speakers; I suspect that this was driven by a sort of residual Chomskyan notion that the linguistic strangeness needed somehow to be explained away.
(Not that I would dispute the idea that culture and language are indeed intimately linked: not an idea congenial to Chomskyites, either. But the devil is in the detail of just how and where this linkage is manifested: obviously so in vocabulary and semantics, much, much less so in syntax, morphology or phonology.)
From the Linguist List post, missing spaces restored:
the normal order, in contexts not conditioned by special discourse factors, was OSV or OVS. […]
Des raised a hand and said politely that he thought the language he had been working on might be an exception, since OVS was its normal order.
Something wrong here. Should “OVS” in the first sentence be SOV?
@hat: Pullam’s “normal order” is describing what he had previously decided was an empty set, i.e. there were no languages with that normal order. Until Derbyshire made him aware of one.
Thanks!
No, the sentence is just too long: “There were no languages […] in which […] the normal order […] was OSV or OVS.”
Ah. Boy, that’s terrible writing!