Re: Interesting vowel harmony system from Australia

In a message dated 7/13/2004 1:42:37 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
treborjung@FREE.FR writes:

>I googled for 'jingulu' to see if there was any more information on it
>online, and found this very interesting paper discussing vowel harmony in
>Jingulu: <http://eprint.uq.edu.au/archive/00000444/01/rpvowel.pdf> .
Thanks for that.

I don't care much about the vowel harmony, but I was interested by the
statement in section 3.2.1 that "personal names cannot be used in sentences."  I
wonder how they generally identify people without using names.

I'm impressed by the author's cultural sensitivity.  He mentions several
interesting facts about Jingulu personal names (they don't follow the language's
usual gender marking conventions; they have consonant clusters otherwise not
allowed . . .) but he resists the temptation to give actual examples of names
because that would be "culturally inappropriate."

Doug

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