Aboriginal Languages Australia

One of a number of puzzles in Archdeacon Günther’s work on Wiradhuri, as printed in Fraser 1892*, relates to the reflexive. Günther had...

Suffixes attached to verbs In Australian indigenous languages, or some at least, there seem to be five kinds of suffixes that may be...

‘KOALA’: what does it mean? A koala is one of Australia’s favourite treasures of the animal kingdom. It looks almost unbearably...

Yarrangobilly is in the Snowy Mountains, about 40 km west from the southern portion of the ACT. This places it in Ngarigo country....

The local zoo was looking for guidance for a name for a walking tour of the zoo, and offered its preliminary ideas: 1 Burraga Nura …...

SYDNEY WORDS William Dawes of the First Fleet wrote, on page 35 of his notebook ‘b’: P. Mr Faddy yéla Mr Clark yenyában Norfolk Island Mr...

SYDNEY WORDS One of the earliest recorded names for Sydney, or Sydney Cove, was provided by Philip Gidley King: This was derived from...

A personal diary entry from January 1984 has the record: “Later we all set off by car headed for Twofold Bay150 km away approx. Did this...

The word “waan”, spelt with a long double-a, appears fairly frequently in the work of Lynette Oates: Oates, Lynette Frances. 1988. The...

Lynette Oates has produced a comprehensive introduction to Muruwari, a language group straddling the NSW-Qld border south of Cunnamulla...

One of the indigenous people encountered by the First Fleeters was Morooberra. The Judge-Advocate, David Collins, who wrote one of the...

THOSE WERE THE DAYS A generation after the upheaval of 1788 and the arrival of the First Fleet, and around 150 km north of Sydney,...

Bokhara In a press report in the Sydney Morning Herald for the last day of 2010, there was the following entry: Moderate to major...

The Rev. Lancelot Threlkeld ran a mission in the Newcastle, NSW, area in the period 1831-41, and while there studied the language that...

Sometime in 1791, William Dawes recorded the verb ‘to tear’, as in ‘tearing a piece of paper’: This was to prove one of many instances of...

Everyone knows the bush call ‘cooee’. Not so many know that it is an Indigenous word, and that it means ‘come’. It was recorded by...

On page 101 of the Rev. William Ridley's Kamilaroi and Other Languages (KAOL)* the following occurs in a list of 21 Dharawal words or...

The Rev. William Ridley (1819-1878) wrote an article, ‘Australian languages and traditions’ (AL&T), published in the February 1878 issue...

Reflecting on the wordlists from the Australian southwest, or no doubt from any area of the country, gives an occasional glimpse of the...

There are some transcontinental words, and bila is one of them. It means ‘stream’. WIRADHURI The following are from the Wiradhuri...