AUTHORS: Nekes, Hermann; Worms, Ernest A. EDITOR: McGregor, William B. TITLE: Australian Languages SERIES TITLE: Trends in Linguistics. Documentation 24 PUBLISHER: Mouton de Gruyter YEAR: 2006
Claire Bowern, Department of Linguistics, Rice University
SUMMARY _Australian Languages_ is a compilation of primarily grammatical and lexical materials from a number of Indigenous Australian languages. It is based on materials collected in the 1930s by Hermann Nekes and Ernest Worms; their manuscript was published in microfilm format in 1953, complete with hand-written corrections to the typescript. While the 1953 manuscript was very useful to those working on North-Western Australian languages, it was not very accessible. The microfilm was hard to obtain and it was difficult to work with. The age and orientation of the work also meant that one already needed a good deal of background in the relevant languages before being able to use it, even though it contained a great deal of valuable material.
The title of the work is a misnomer; the great majority of data come from Nyulnyulan languages (spoken in far North-West Australia) and their immediate neighbors, although sporadic other languages are also quoted, and there is an appendix on Dyirbal. The book has the format of a comparative grammar, and covers such topics as noun and verb morphology, ''phonetics'' (Nekes and Worms have no concept of the phoneme), adjectives, pronouns, adverbs, exclamations (interjections, curses and good wishes) and a text collection. The massive comparative dictionary is not printed in the hard copy of the book but is available on the CD-ROM which accompanies the book (and is available in XML, formatted html, and in Toolbox backslash codes). The CD also has the texts, a facsimile of the pages keyed to the original manuscript, and some sound files and photographs.
William McGregor has edited and annotated the original manuscript. McGregor has left the original largely intact, preferring to annotate rather than correct. There is a general introduction to the book by McGregor, including the history of publication, some background to data collection, information about the authors and their knowledge of linguistics, and an explanation of the conventions of the book. This is followed by the authors' (that is, Nekes and Worms') introduction. Each chapter also has an editor's introduction. Therefore, this book is an edited volume where the original authors' insights and analysis come through, rather than a book which represents our current state of knowledge of Nyulnyulan languages. This is simultaneously an advantage for students of the history of linguistics and a disadvantage for those using the book as a comparative grammar of Nyulnyulan.
The phonetics chapter covers the sounds found in the languages as a whole, with notes on differences between the languages. There is some note of the major correspondences (e.g. Bardi o: corresponding to Nyulnyul obo), although Nekes and Worms do not draw any historical conclusions or reconstruct any forms. The chapter on nouns includes not only inflectional morphology but also some comments on lexical semantics and cultural items (for example, terms for seasons). Again, comparisons are drawn but these are not specific claims of cognacy. The chapter also covers derivational morphology, such as compounding strategies and semantics. There is considerable over-etymologizing in this chapter; for example, there is no reason to suppose that Bardi garrabal 'bird' is bimorphemic, containing a morpheme -bal of unknown meaning.
In the verb chapter, there is extensive information about both regular and irregular verbs, and here the differences among the languages are clearer. The ''adverbs'' chapter also includes conjunctions such as translation equivalents of 'or'. The texts section includes both traditional narratives (some of which contain gender restricted material) and oral history, in several languages. In the case of the Jabirr-Jabirr sources, these texts appear to be our only source of extended language and so are especially valuable. There are also many example sentences in addition to the texts at the end of the work, so there are plenty of primary materials to work from.
EVALUATION I have split the critical evaluation into two sections. First I discuss Nekes and Worms' component of the book. I then focus on McGregor's editorial work before giving a general evaluation.
To be honest, Nekes and Worms' scholarship is pretty naive in some areas, even taking into account when they were working. This is not a book by Boas, Sapir or Bloomfield. I suspect that at least some of the problems can be attributed to problems in transcription. For example, in not notating the difference between homorganic nasal-stop palatal clusters and heterorganic apical nasal-palatal stop clusters (nyj and nj in Bardi orthography) they miss an important difference between intransitive and transitive verb conjugation for palatal-initial roots. Compare, for example, inyjoogoolij 'it broke' with injoogoolij 'he broke it'. (On the other hand, it's hard to imagine how a statement like ''Australian aborigines attach a greater importance to consonants than to vowels.'' (p58) can be attributed to transcription errors alone.)
I strongly suspect that Nekes and Worms regularized their comparative data; for example they quote forms in Nyikina with long vowels, where only the cognates in Bardi have long vowels (Nyikina has lost all vowel length contrasts). Some of the Bardi forms are suspicious and may reflect standardization towards Nyulnyul (the most clear are the subsection terms; although they are attributed to Bardi, Bardi people have never used such terms, and have a different kinship structure). Comparison with Nimanburru data recorded by Anthony Peile in the 1960s indicates that the Nimanburru forms in this book are in general closer to Nyulnyul than Peile's data; however, because we know very little about the circumstances of collection of either source, it isn't known whether these are real (e.g. dialectal) differences or Neks and Worms' editorial intervention. They are inconsistent in segmentation and they miss other morpheme boundaries (e.g. the continuative suffix in 'present' stems, and the spurious 'ma-agolen' vs 'm-agolen' 'break' (Bardi)).
Another problem is language attribution. For example, the Bardi dative is given as -dj [-j in the current community orthography] but we are then given a whole lot of examples from Nyulnyul. The dative in Bardi is extremely rare in both the modern language and in texts recorded in the 1920s; therefore, although the suffix exists in Bardi it does not have the same function and distribution as the other Western Nyulnyulan languages. We therefore get a picture of overgeneralized homogeneity and we should be cautious about extrapolating too far about the behavior of one language in the family from another. Set against this, however, are the number of parallel translations, which greatly facilitate comparison.
While I have been critical of the linguistic analysis in _Australian Languages_, it is still a valuable work. This book is an important resource for a number of languages which are no longer spoken and for which this book is almost the sole source. It is an early example of comparative work and is of interest for the history of linguistics (especially in Australia). Many of the problems I mention here are also noted by McGregor.
I now turn to the editorial comments. McGregor has done a great deal to make the 1953 edition more usable, and the CD adds a lot to the book, for both audiences using the book for language data and those who are focused more on the history of linguistics and missionary linguistic work in Australia. The structure of the original is maintained but the text is annotated with error corrections, explanations for non-specialists, and references to more recent work. This is a complex book to work from, though. For example, McGregor's notes appear in several different places; at the bottom of tables, in the text itself, between [], in the endnotes, and some items are unmarked (but the reference to Metcalfe 1975 must be the editor's).
There are a few mechanical issues that I want to mention, too. These are minor, but given the cost of Mouton's books, at more than 50c per page I think we have a right to font kerning. The engma seems to have been inserted from a different font. A syllabic mark is used instead of an underdot to mark retroflection, and apparently [p xxix] it wasn't possible to use a capital engma in the text. There is misalignment in the tables and numerous diacritics are poorly spaced with respect to their host character. The index appears to be missing a lot of languages; for example Goa (Guwa) is given in the language list but not in the index. (This is where being able to search the pdf is useful.)
Finally, a book like this brings up questions of context. In 1953, the year the manuscript first appeared, Aboriginal people in Australia could not vote, could not enter pubs, and in many states could not marry without the consent of an overseer. Opportunities were very limited and 'light-skinned' children were still being taken from families without their consent and placed in orphanages and foster homes (the Stolen Generations). The fact that anyone found the time and energy beyond survival for language work is testament to a strength and care for culture which should be acknowledged, and is reflected in McGregor's dedication of the book to the Indigenous people with whom Nekes and Worms were known to have worked.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER Claire Bowern is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Rice University. She is a historical linguist who works on Australian Indigenous languages. She is the other Nyulnyulan specialist.
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