Re: Dyirbal?

Quoting Roger Mills <rfmilly@...>:

> Wesley Parish wrote:
>
> > Austronesian languages are derived from a proto-Austronesian language
> > spoken
> > in Taiwan around about 3 000 years ago.
>
> Make that more like 4-5000 B.C.E (6-7000 years ago). Otherwise you've
> given
> a very good summary of what's currently known/believed.
Thanks.
>
> The residents must've got restless
> > and shifted further south, until Austronesian is the world's most
> widely
> > scattered stone-age era language family, with speakers spread from
> > Madagascar
> > to Easter Island and Hawai'i. The only place the Australian languages
> met
> > the Austronesian languages was around Darwin/Arnhem Land, where there
> was
> > a
> > scattered trading trips from Indonesia;
>
> I imagine you're referring to the known contacts (certainly beginning
> early
> in the C.E. if not before, and lasting up to around 1900 IIRC) with
> Makassarese sailor/traders and their polyglot crews who visited that
> area to
> collect tripang ("sea cucumber") for the Chinese market. Because of the
Yes.  It's common knowledge to anyone who cares to read a bit of the
background of that part of the world.  I read Xavier Herbert's two novels,
Capricornia and Poor Fellow My Country and read a bit of back-up history to
make sure he wasn't pulling my leg. ;)
> monsoon wind patterns, they had to hang around for about 6 months
> before
> they could sail home; some of the loan words detected involve some very
> naughty sexual practices.......(I have an article somewhere if you're
> interested)
(pant pant pant pant - tongue hanging out ;) Yes please!  (I've got one
central character of my novel, Praleyo, being accused of various sexual
practices with the other central character Vheratsho, and wanting to take note
- primarily to shock her - she's savage and vicious, but very, very proper in
certain regards.  Her mind is compartmentalized ... ;)
>
> It could be that if anyone familiar with both Australian and
> Austronesian
> (more specifically I think, Indonesian) languages took a really good
> look,
You mean the various languages of the Indonesian archipelago, as opposed to
Bahasa Indonesia.  I learnt a bit of Bahasa in Deakin High in Canberra, but I
suffered from the Eurocentric worldview at that stage, as did my fellow
adolescent school-sufferers.  Nusuth.  I'll just have to brush it off and dig
it up, and try to find info on Australian languages and Indonesian languages
etc, maybe even beg the aid of a few Indonesian language speakers - if I can
find them.
> they might find other areas :-) A long time ago I watched a
> Natl.Georgraphic program on the Gagadu (Kakadu?) people of Cape York
> (?)--
> it mentioned their animal totem, the sea eagle 'mara(vw)uti'-- at the
> time I
> was researching some languages of the Timor area, and noted a word
> (wv)uti
> 'to seize, grab', with a compound .....wuti that meant, indeed, sea
> eagle.
> Coincidence?
Doubt it.  Cape York's the peninsular almost reaching the belly of the New
Guinea island - Torres Strait's in between.  I had never thought of that as
being part of the Makassarese sailor/traders stomping ground, but it's only a
hop skip and a jump away, and it's not inconceivable.
>
Wesley Parish

"Sharpened hands are happy hands.
"Brim the tinfall with mirthful bands"
- A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge

"I me.  Shape middled me.  I would come out into hot!"
I from the spicy that day was overcasked mockingly - it's a symbol of the
other horizon. - emacs : meta x dissociated-press