The Nature and Development of Australian Languages

Abstract

The first Australian word list was taken down in 1770 by Captain James Cook (12) and Sir Joseph Banks (3) during their six weeks on shore in northeast Queensland repairing the Endeavour after it had been damaged on the Great Barrier Reef. The 180 Guugu Yimidhirr words included /karjurru/, transcribed as kangaroo, the most notable loan word from an Australian language into English. In 1820 Captain P. P. King (43) revisited the Endeavour River and replicated most of Cook's list, except that he obtained menuah for kangaroo, suggesting perhaps that Cook had made a mistake with his term; in fact, King had been given /minha/, a generic term meaning edible animal. Roth (53) and Haviland (34) have pointed out that /karjurru/ is a bone fide Guugu Yimidhirr word. When Governor Arthur Phillip brought the first convict party to Sydney Cove in 1788, he was greatly surprised to find that none of the words recorded by Cook were recognized by the local Aborigines. Then, in April 1791, Phillip explored to the Hawkesbury River, 40 miles to the northwest of Sydney, and found a different language spoken there (51); this gave the first clue that there must in fact be many different languages spoken in Australia. The next advance in Australian linguistics was due to the explorer Captain George Grey (28). In 1841 he pointed out the similarities in form and meaning between lexical items, and also pronouns, in languages from different parts of the continent and suggested, in effect, that the many different languages of Australia comprised a single family. Most later workers have implicitly followed Grey in ascribing a genetic unity to the 200 or so distinct languages of Australia. Yet attempts at proof