APPENDIX B - PREVIOUS WORK ON DYIRBAL

Summary

Previous work on the dialects of Dyirbal can be grouped into three categories. Firstly, work by amateurs who had no linguistic training and no understanding of or feel for the language. The earliest attempt was that of William Carron, botanist with the Kennedy expedition, on 26 May 1848. The three words given by Carron were probably taken from speakers of Giramay; they are [Carron, 1849: 9]:

‘hammoo’, fresh water (probably gamu)

‘taa-taa’ dog (probably G guda, possibly Wargamay bada)

‘mocull’ salt water (the original is unrecognisable)

The next publications were an eighty-word ‘Vocabulary of the Kirrami tribe’ by A. Douglas Douglas [1900] – mistakenly attributed to A. C. MacDougall in Craig [1967] – and a two-hundred-word ‘Vocabulary of the Kiramai language’ by the Rev. J. Mathew [1926]. Allowing maximum leeway for different possibilities of orthographic representation, only 20% of Douglas's words are correctly transcribed. John Mathew grew up as a speaker of Gabi and wrote a useful account of that language; he must, however, have had the most glancing of acquaintanceships with Giramay, and his transcription is less than successful, especially as regards vowels. More recently, Sydney May [1954] produced a list of 117 Mamu words; not only are these badly transcribed, but May attempts to hear a distinction in Mamu where there is none, to correspond to every contrast in English. He has tipan ‘rock’ but tipun ‘stone’ (both are diban), and pookabin ‘dead’ as against porkarbin ‘to die (v)’ (bugabin must have been meant, in each case).