Or, to put it more expansively and comprehensibly, Toukley’s Kooloora Preschool revives endangered Darkinjung Aboriginal language; Sarah Forster and Emma Simkin report for ABC on the kind of program I like supporting (I’ve added links):
Students at a NSW Central Coast preschool start their day talking about their feelings in Darkinjung, the local Aboriginal language. Darkinjung is the predominant First Nations group in the region, but the language became endangered fairly quickly after colonisation due to its proximity to Sydney.
“It’s taken a lot of research, a lot of hard work from people that have come before me to get those words so we can start learning them again,” preschool educational leader Sharon Buck said. Ms Buck is a proud Gamilaroi woman who has lived and worked on Darkinjung country her whole life.
Kooloora is a targeted Aboriginal preschool attached to Toukley Public School. About 75 per cent of students identify as Aboriginal, but Ms Buck said all families appreciated the opportunity to learn language and culture. Amber Clenton’s daughter, Islah, has attended Kooloora since the beginning of the year. She has started bringing the language and songs home. “Our whole family is Aboriginal, so we love to learn the language,” Ms Clenton said. […]
Arliah James is one of Kooloora’s non-Aboriginal students. Her mother, Kelsey, said she was benefiting from the Darkinjung language program. “I just love how this school incorporates it [culture] a lot and it is not getting forgotten,” Ms James said. […]
Ms Buck’s commitment to restoring language has resulted in the preschool earning the highest rating achievable for an early childhood education and care service. The rating of excellent, from the Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority, is an honour Kooloora shares with just 10 other facilities in NSW. “It validates that the service is a leader in our community and for other early childhood services, and that our initiatives are recognised and valued as making a difference for children and families,” Ms Buck said.
The preschool is working with other local schools to share the localised Aboriginal curriculum.
The ethnonym Gamilaroi is from gamil ‘no,’ a common pattern among Australian languages.
According to wikipedia, the population of Toukley as of the 2021 census included 8.2% “identified as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander,” which is meaningfully higher than the figure for NSW as a whole (3.4%) or Australia as a whole (3.1%), and maybe creates enough critical mass for the local school system to arrange things accordingly. But I have no idea what the various ethnic identities and spoken languages of the ancestors of that 8.2% might be,* since one certainly can’t expect that everyone of autochthonous ancestry is currently situated within 5 or 10 or 50 miles of wherever their ancestors were as of the late 18th century. There’s also a statement elsewhere on wikipedia suggesting that the city limits of Toukley fall within the traditional turf of the Awabakal peoples, with the ditto of the Darkinjung being just a little bit further south, but maybe there are disputes about that. “Toukley” itself is supposed to be a clipping of toponym of “Aboriginal” etymology but as so often happens no more specific claim is made about the language of origin.
*And many may descend from multiple Aboriginal groups and many may descend in part (in some cases quite substantial part) from European-or-other incomers, which creates various sorts of confusions and controversies as will tend to happen with applying such labels to a species whose subgroups are not consistently endogamous.
The ethnonym Gamilaroi is from gamil ‘no,’ a common pattern among Australian languages.
Of course the Antipodean version of Languedoc would reverse the polarity.
Europeans in general (with some exceptions) seem to show a good bit more similarity in the way they say “no” than in the way they say “yes.”
Oti-Volta languages tend more to the Australian side. The issue in Oti-Volta is complicated by the fact that negative particles are suppletive for mood; only the particle for negating imperatives is reconstructable to proto-Oti-Volta.
Not even the close-knit Western Oti-Volta subgroup has indicative negative particles reconstructable to its protolanguage: thus “I don’t want to”/”I don’t want it” in Kusaal is
M pʋ bɔɔda.
I not want.NEGATIVE
but in Mooré it’s
Mam ka baood ye.
I not want NEGATIVE
Incidentally, there is a minor Songhay variety in Burkina Faso which has borrowed the Moore negator.
That’s even more enterprising than borrowing personal pronouns …
The proclitic ka part, or the VP-final ye, or both?
Only Mooré and the Kusaal-Nabit-Talni subgroup have bipartite negators within Western Oti-Volta. It’s tempting to speculate that this is might be a substrate thing (Bisa does too.) The phenomenon seems to be different from the superficially similar French or Germanic (or Welsh) developments: the second part is VP-final, following rather than preceding any complements or VP adjuncts, and it shows no sign of deriving from a former noun.
@de
There are a couple of things here.
1. The emphatic no word is designed to prompt immediate reaction; this would select for a monosyllable with a prolongable vowel. Compare other emphatics: Ach/O, Eh/Hey/Oy/Ay, etc.
2. There are various non-emphatic no prefixes or adjectives; these differ in different IE languages, except where borrowed (English in-, non-), some of these are parallel (kein in German, aucun in French)
3. The no particle may have different meanings (e.g., not currently, not in the past, not ever, not at all, not at all at all, etc.), which require different words or qualifiers, like ne jamais or ne point in French. This seems to me to be what could be going on with your O-V examples.
No; Kusaal is fairly typical of Oti-Volta as far as the preverbal negative particles go: they are suppletive by VP mood, specifically:
Indicative:
M gɔs biig la. “I’ve looked at the child.”
M pʋ gɔs biig laa. “I’ve not looked at the child.”
Irrealis:
M na gɔs biig la. “I’ll look at the child.”
M kʋ gɔs biig laa. “I’ll not look at the child.”
Imperative:
Gɔsim biig la. “Look at the child!”
Da gɔs biig laa. “Don’t look at the child.”
The change of the final la “the” to laa is the sandhi effect of the VP-final negative enclitic, which has no segmental form of its own, and does not vary by mood. This particle, like the equivalent Mooré ye, is not emphatic: it’s required whenever the VP is negative.* It’s effectively meaningless. Historically, the Kusaal negative enclitic must have derived from a short V: it’s been subjected to the Kusaal speciality of final short-vowel deletion, which has operated even on pronouns and particles which only ever consisted of a short vowel altogether in the first place, with the result that the language has a good half-dozen perfectly real distinct words which surface as – nothing whatsoever.
The Kusaal negative enclitic is probably actually cognate to Mooré ye. But in any case, it can’t possibly derive from a noun or adverb.
This is a different issue from words for “yes” and “no” (it was my fault for confusing the issue here.)
* Including at the end of VPs headed by a “negative verb”, like zi’ “not know”; except, interestingly, when the negative verb is itself VP-final.
M mi’ biig la. “I know the child.”
M zi’ biig laa. “I don’t know the child.”
but just M zi’ “I don’t know”, not *M zi’i. Suggestions on a postcard to …
Ha!
J’ignore !
Clearly you have an invisible object preceding the invisible negative particle here. Are there any suitable evanescent anaphoric, relative or demonstrative pronouns…?
The 3rd sg animate object pronoun usually surfaces as zero, but causes sandhi changes in the preceding word (which have – understandably – been traditionally misinterpreted as actually being the pronoun.) No such effect is present here.
With many transitive verbs, 3rd person object pronouns can be omitted altogether, with an anaphoric sense necessarily resulting, but that would leave the verb itself immediately followed by the (segmentally zero) negative enclitic and subject to its sandhi effects, which is exactly what hasn’t happened in M zi’. Contrast e.g.
Fʋ nɔŋ o kʋʋ?
you love her or
“Do you love her?”
Ayei, m pʋ nɔŋɛ.
no I not love.NEGATIVE
“No, I don’t love [her].”
where the final ɛ of nɔŋɛ is due to the final negative enclitic, which has the sandhi effect of suppressing the “apocope” of final short vowels (or shortening of final long vowels) which affects Kusaal words by default in most contexts.
Moreover, the clitic is also absent when the negative verb kae /kaj/ “not exist” appears clause-finally (otherwise, the verb would have surfaced as /kaɪ/.) In this case, there’s no question of a following object.
So I think this has to been interpreted as actual absence of the negative clitic by syntactic rule.
The negative enclitic is mandatory when the verb is preceded by an actual negative particle like pʋ, but with “negative verbs” the situation seems to be more complicated. Thus mit is a defective verb only used in the imperative; with a NP object it means “beware”, and does not induce a final negative enclitic:
Mit ziri nodi’esidib.
beware lie linguists
“Beware of false prophets.”
but with a following “catenative” clause it means “don’t let …” and does induce a negative enclitic:
Mit ka o kulɛ
“Let him not go home” (kul “go home.”)
Just to complicate matters still further, in the 2016 Bible version, but not previous versions, the negative clitic in this construction is dropped:
Mid ka ya zu. (not zuu)
“May you not steal.”
Beautiful theory slain by ugly fact, then. However, here’s some more beauty:
Nicht, dass er heimgeht!
An expression of fear: “[I’ll do/let’s do what I or someone else said earlier] lest he go home!”
I think it’s likely enough that the “beware” sense of mit was historically prior (though now comparatively rare.) Cave ne eas …
In a similar vein, Kusaal actually can use the loanword asɛɛ “unless, except for” adverbially in the sense “necessarily”, e.g.
Asɛɛ ka fʋ kpi.
unless and you die
“You will surely die.”
This seems to be a regionalism: cf Hausa
Sai sun biya ni tukuna.
unless they.PERFECTIVE pay me first
“They must pay me first.”