Yarning about Language — Dieri families workshop

On the weekend of 11-12th November 2023 Dieri families met in Broken Hill, New South Wales, for a workshop called Yarning about Language, to talk about Diyari language and to practice some words and expressions. This was the first time a language workshop had been organised in Broken Hill — it was arranged and paid for by the families themselves. Peter Austin (linguist) and Taryn Debney (archaeologist) were invited along to talk about their work, including the visit to Killalpaninna in December 2022, but the main focus was on language learning and use. Readers who are on Facebook can find out more on the https://www.facebook.com/dieri.language page.

The workshop was attended by about 60 enthusiastic participants over the two days, many of whom came on both days. They included elders from Port Augusta (South Australia) and Broken Hill, parents, teenagers, as well as children as young as seven. Everyone joined in the activities of learning words and expressions (such as parts of the body, and greetings), singing (especially mangathandra pilpiri pantya thina ‘head shoulders knees toes’), and playing lingo bingo, a game where players match picture cards with the Diyari word by listening to them said aloud. We concentrated on listening and saying skills, and did not worry about how to spell the words as the focus was on hearing and speaking the language, rather than reading and writing. Copies of the Diyari Reference Dictionary by Peter Austin were given to family groups so they can look up words and spelling themselves later — interested readers can download a PDF of the dictionary to their phone, iPad, or computer (or print it off) at http://www.peterkaustin.com/docs/Austin_2013_Diyari_Dictionary.pdf.

Everyone attending knew many of the words we practiced, including the younger children. When talking about parts of the body the children suggested thina puta ‘shoe’ (made up of thina ‘foot’ and puta ‘boot’, originally from English). When asked how they knew that word, they said their father always told them “don’t go out thina puta parlu“, that is, without any shoes on (the word parlu means ‘naked’). So families in Broken Hill are using Diyari language every day along with English.

The workshop was a great success and the two days were enjoyed by everyone who came along. In the final yarning sessions the Broken Hill families asked for more workshops in the future, especially trips to Killalpaninna where people can use the language on Dieri country.

Muku pirna

An article (available for free download here) that was published in June 2020 in the leading international scientific journal Nature contains words in the Diyari (Dieri) language, namely muku pirna meaning ‘big bones’, from muku ‘bone, bones’ and pirna ‘big’. Actually, the expression muku pirna meaning ‘big bones’ also occurs in the Malyangapa language that was traditionally spoken in north-east South Australia and far western New South Wales.

The six scientist authors report that the bones and teeth of a new species of ancient extinct large animal (related to the giant marsupials Diprotodon and Thylacoleo, whose modern relatives are wombats and koalas) were discovered in the Namba Formation of South Australia, dating from the late Oligocene period (26–25 million years ago). The location where the bones were found is near Lake Pinpa, south-east of Lake Frome in Malyangapa country.

Size estimates based on the bones and teeth suggest that the muku pirna was between 143 and 171 kg, suggesting that it was around 5 times larger than living wombats — not something you would like to wrap your bullbar around!

Diyari and Malyangapa have now entered scientists’ vocabularies, as the new species is officially called Mukupirna nambensis and is part of a new family called Mukupirnidae. The scientists note in their article that the “name is from the words muku (“bones”) and pirna (“big”) in the Dieri (Diyari) language traditionally spoken in the area around Lake Eyre and refers to the large size of the animal”. Unfortunately, they don’t mention the Malyangapa connection.

Many thanks to David Nash for letting us know about this article and its connections to Diyari (Dieri).

Anzac Day 2023

The New South Wales group who support the Gamilaraay language have just released a poster in their language for Anzac Day 2023. It is based on the artwork of Lee Hampton, Wodi Wodi, Worimi, Yuin artist (www.koorikicksart.com.au).

How could we express something like this in the Diyari language? I suggest the following as a possibility:

Ngayana thananha partyarna ngundripalha nganayi

This means ‘We will think about them all’ and is made up of the following words:

• ngayana — ‘we all, including you’
• thananha — ‘them (object of the sentence)’
• partyarna — ‘all’
• ngundripalha — ‘think about for someone else’s benefit’. This is made up of the root ngundra-rna ‘to think’ plus the ending -ipa- ‘do for the benefit of other people’ and the ending -lha ‘future’
• nganayi — ‘will’

With this Diyari expression we could commemorate the many karna (Aboriginal people) and walypala (non-Aboriginal people) who gave their lives in armed conflict.

You can listen to this post, including how the Diyari words are pronounced, here: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/peterkaustin01/episodes/Anzac-Day-2023-e22u7ii

10 years of the Dieri Language Blog

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the Dieri Language Blog: Ngayana Diyari Yawarra Yathayilha ‘We are all speaking Dieri now’. The first posts went live on 15th February 2013, and there have been another 96 since then. Over the years, we have had 21,000 visitors to the site, resulting in over 39,000 views. Since 2020, page views have totalled over 6,000 each year. We are very pleased to see the interest in the Dieri language, and look forward to your continued support in the years ahead.

We have recently started a new project connected to the blog which is a series of podcasts where you can hear the content of blog posts, including the pronunciation of Dieri words. If you are keen to learn to hear and speak some Dieri and you do not have access to a speaker of the language, then these podcasts might be a way for you to start learning words and expressions. The podcasts are free to listen to on Anchor or Spotify, and we will be gradually adding to them over the coming months and years. You can read along with the podcast by opening the relevant blog post page. Here is a list of the podcasts and the related blog post.

Title		Podcast	Blog post
Waranha yini?	Who are you?	link	link
Wardaru yini?	How are you?	link	link
Pirra ya pityi	Bark and coolamon	link	link
Tyaputyapu	Little balls	link	link
Yawa	Wild onions	link	link

If you can, please provide us with feedback in the comments section below about your experiences with the podcasts as this will help us to develop and improve them in future.

Pirra ya pityi

[You can listen to a podcast of this blog post here]

The Dieri people traditionally made a very versatile tool out of tree bark (pityi) called a pirra, which is usually called ‘coolamon’ in English. These pirra (not to be confused with pira ‘moon’!) were of various sizes and used to carry water (ngapa), seeds (thandra) and vegetables (puka), tools (like wadna digging stick), and even babies (kupa). They could also be used as digging implements: widlhali kurdu pakuyi pirrali ‘the woman is digging a hole in the ground with a coolamon’.

Coolamons were made by cutting the bark off a living tree with stone axes and wedges, and then heating and shaping them over a fire. They could be decorated with ochre and/or incisions.

On our recent trip to Killalpaninna in Dieri country we were able to visit a pathara tree that a pirra had been cut out from — the Dieri traditional owners described how it had been made and used.

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Words in this post:

pirra

pira

pityi

pathara

ngapa

thandra

puka

wadna

coolamon

moon

bark

coolibah tree

water

seed

vegetable food

woman’s digging stick

Tyaputyapu

[You can listen to a podcast of this blog post here]

In Dieri country east of Lake Eyre there are very few stones or rocks. The landscape is a combination of sandhills, claypans, salt lakes, and gibber plains (comprising small red stones) and there are no stone outcrops or hills. Traditionally, rocks for grinding stones (in Diyari called marda, the smaller upper grinding stone is called marda kuparru), that were used to make flour from seeds, were traded in from other groups. Grinding stones came from quite some distance away, such as Yandruwandha country near Innamincka or Kuyani country near Finniss Springs. They were exchanged for local products and the ochre (called pukartu) collected by the Dieri at Parachilna in the Flinders Ranges and carried on foot for over 400 kilometers (for more details see Jones 2007).

Because there were no rocks, Dieri and other groups in central Australia moulded clay balls (called tyaputyapu) for use as heat retainers in cooking. They would prepare the clay balls by heating them in hot ashes to fire them and turn the clay hard. These were then used to cook in an earth oven — people would dig a hole in the ground (called kurdu) and put the balls in it, and then build a fire (thurru) on top. When the clay balls were hot, the hot coals would be removed, and then food would be placed in the pit on top of the clay balls for cooking. This was then covered with a mixture of hot coals and sand, and left for 30 minutes or more until the food was ready to remove from the earth oven and eat.

There is evidence in the archaeological record that this method of cooking was used by the Dieri and other groups for many thousands of years (see this 2009 report by Don Hitchcock about Lake Mungo in New South Wales). The explorer Edward John Eyre gives a first-hand report of seeing this method of cooking in 1845:

The native oven is made by digging a circular hole in the ground, of a size corresponding to the quantity of food to be cooked. It is then lined with stones in the bottom (or clay balls where stones are unavailable), and a strong fire made over them so as to heat them thoroughly, and dry the hole. As soon as the stones are judged to be sufficiently hot, the fire is removed, and a few of the stones taken, and put inside the animal to be roasted if it be a large one. A few leaves or a handful of grass, are then sprinkled over the stones in the bottom of the oven, on which the animal is deposited, generally whole, with hot stones… laid on top of it. It is covered with grass, or leaves, and then thickly coated over with earth, which effectually prevents the heat from escaping.

After outsiders arrived in Dieri country, this method of cooking seems to have been no longer practised. Aunty Rene does not remember her mother (ngandri) or grandmother Amanya Frieda (kadnhini ‘mother’s mother’) cooking in this way, so probably by the end of the 19th century it had gone out of use.

On our recent trip to Killalpaninna, Michelle Warren and her daughter (ngathani ‘child of a woman’, the child of a man is ngathamurra) Dakota and her niece Mikayla (also called ngathani in Diyari) decided to recreate the traditional cooking method. They made tyaputyapu clay balls (about the size of a person’s fist) out of the local soil mixed with water, and fired them in the ashes of our cooking hearth (in Dieri thurru manya). Two days later they made an earth oven, and prepared it in the same way Eyre describes with the tyaputyapu (photo by Pete Howard, (c) 2002 TDAC, used with permission).

They prepared some damper (made of flour and water), and put it on the tyaputyapu, covered it with ashes and sand, and left it to cook. Around 45 minutes later we all have a lovely feed of cooked damper (ngayani dampa thayirna parraya ‘we all (not including you) ate the damper’). It was really good: matya manyu marla!

So, a traditional cooking practice, which had gone out of use over 100 years ago, was revived on Dieri country by Dieri women.

References

Eyre, Edward John. 1845. Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia. London: T & W Boone.

Jones, Philip. 2007. Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and encounters on Australian frontiers. Adelaide: Wakefield Press.

Kararaya yawarra — word of the day: yawa

[You can listen to a podcast of this blog post here]

An important source of food is Dieri country is yawa, usually translated as ‘wild onion’ or ‘bush onion’. The word is spelled in early records as “yowa” or “jaua” — Reuther mentions them 82 times in his dictionary. The scientific name is Cyperus bulbosus (see Johnston & Cleland 1943 page 157).

During our recent visit to Killalpaninna, Michelle Warren identified a patch of yawa growing under a patharra ‘coolibah tree’ near the entrance to Etadunna Station beside the Birdsville track, so we went there and she demonstrated how to dig for yawa and collect them to eat. In this picture (photo by Jan Scott, (c) 2022 TDAC, used with permission), Michelle shows the yawa plant. In Diyari we say: widlhali yawa wandrayi ‘the woman shows the yawa’. (click on the image to enlarge it)

This photo shows how to dig for yawa, Michelle gently moved her hand across the ground to dislodge the rhizomes and then picked them out of the soil (photo by Jan Scott, (c) TDAC, used with permission). In Diyari we say: widlhali mitha pakuyi yawaya ‘the woman digs the ground for yawa’.

The yawa come out of the ground with a dark-coloured skin (in Diyari paka), which must be peeled off to reveal the white seed inside that can then be either eaten raw (it has a nutty taste, akin to cashew or almond) or cooked in the ashes. These photos (photo by Pete Howard, (c) 2022 TDAC, used with permission) show Michelle holding the unpeeled and peeled yawa. In Diyari we say: widlhali yawa pardayi marali ‘the woman is holding yawa with her hands’.

It takes quite a lot of yawa to make a meal. Traditionally, women would grind the yawa to make a flour that was mixed with water and moulded into a bread-like cake that was baked in the ashes. Michelle and Reg, her father, reported that some time ago they collected a lot of yawa and put them in a used jam tin which they then heated on the fire until the yawa popped like popcorn.

Words in today’s post:

widlha ‘woman’ (we add the ending -li when it is the woman who is doing an action)

wandrayi ‘is showing’ (the root is wandra ‘to show’ and the ending -yi means ‘action now, is …ing’, called the ‘present tense’)

mitha ‘ground, earth, soil’

pakuyi ‘is digging’ (the root is paku ‘to dig’ and the ending -yi means ‘action now, is …ing’, called the ‘present tense’)

yawaya ‘for yawa’ (we add the ending -ya to show the goal or purpose, like we saw in the previous post kirlawirlpaya ‘to Killalpaninna’)

pardayi ‘is holding’ (the root is parda ‘to hold’ and the ending -yi means ‘action now, is …ing’, called the ‘present tense’)

marali ‘in the hand’ (we add the ending -li to show the means or instrument used in an action)

Reference

Johnston, T. Harvey and Cleland, John Burton. 1943. Native names and uses of plants in the north-eastern corner of South Australia. Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia 67, 149-173.

Ngayani waparna parraya Kirlawirlpaya

From 7th to 13th December 2022 a group of Dieri people and researchers (14 people in all) spent a week on Dieri country at Killalpaninna near Cooper Creek in the far north of South Australia. Killalpaninna (in Diyari kirlawirlpanhinha) was established as a Lutheran mission in 1866 and was closed by the Australian government in 1915. The main language of daily use on the mission was Diyari (the missionaries and workers learned to speak it, and it was used in the school and church, with various religious materials translated into Diyari).

Today, only ruins remain of the mission, but it continues to be an important historical anchor for many Dieri people, and a significant place that they like to visit.

Killalpaninna cemetary

This trip included members of four generations of the Warren and Kennedy families: Rene, Geoffrey, Reg, Nita, Marjorie, Michelle, Mikayla, and Dakota, together with Peter (linguist), Jan (anthropologist), Taryn (archaeologist), Zoe (botanist), Pete (videographer) and Daryl (community development, logisitics support).

We visited a number of sites around Killalpaninna and were able to observe and document food gathering, plant use, stone tool making, and cooking techniques, as well as record some archaeologically significant occupation sites. We did lots of interviews with Aunty Rene and others in English and Diyari, many of which were professionally filmed. Over the next few weeks we will post about some of our activities, so come back regularly and check out the new blog posts (click on the photos below to make them bigger).

north of Lake Killalpaninna

interview: Marjorie, Taryn and Pete

Michelle, Uncle Geoffrey, Aunty Rene

The heading of today’s post means “We went to Killalpaninna” and consists of:

ngayani ‘we all (not including you)’

waparna ‘go’

parraya ‘action in the past week or two’ (for more details of its use see here)

Kirlawirlpa ‘Killalpaninna’

-ya ‘to’

Reuther’s Diari Dictionary

There is a large amount of published and unpublished material on the Diyari language which was put together by German Lutheran missionaries between 1866 and 1915. Some of this is translations from German, such as the New Testament (Testamenta Marra) by J.C. Reuther and C. Strehlow, published in 1897.

Another major source is a four volume manuscript Diyari to German dictionary compiled by Rev. J.G. Reuther, amounting to 1,238 pages. The manuscript is handwritten in a script that is difficult to read and the only copy is held in the South Australian Museum in Adelaide — here is a sample page photographed by Philip Jones in 2021.

In 1974, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (AIAS, now Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, AIATSIS) provided funding for Pastor Philipp Scherer, the first archivist of the Lutheran Church of Australia, to translate the whole of Reuther’s manuscript into English. Here is a page from Scherer’s translation (in 1981 a microfiche of the translation was published by AIAS — it is difficult to use because specialist equipment is needed to read it):

The dictionary is very rich in having 4,179 numbered entries, with over 16,000 sub-entries, mostly compounds or phrases that exemplify particular meanings or uses of the entry word. There are over 6,000 notes that provide additional information about entries, such as relationships to Diyari mythology, or ethnographic information about traditional practices, as in the instance of “muntja tapana” (in modern spelling muntya thaparna) ‘to suck on a patient’ seen in the picture above. It is a remarkable record of material culture, ceremony, trade, mythology, and associations between them and the landscape. Much of this mythological and traditional knowledge is not available in materials arising from subsequent research because it was lost following the closure of the mission in 1915, and the subsequent disruption of the Dieri community and its transmission of culture. In addition, the dictionary is an extremely valuable source for idioms or other ways of speaking which reflect Dieri cosmology or categorisation, as well as how to interact. An example of this is the many idioms based on body-part terms which appear scattered throughout the examples in the dictionary. However, the dictionary still remains difficult to use in its current form because of problems with the spelling, grammatical information, and the scattered and inconsistent nature of the content. It is also very difficult to search in both its paper version (which only exists in the AIATSIS library) and the microfiche publication.

In 1989, David Nash and Jane Simpson, working at AIATSIS on the National Lexicography Project, scanned Volumes I to IV of the Scherer typescript using a Kurzweil Discover 7320 Model 30 scanner and optical character reader to create digitised plain text files like the following (compare the picture above of this page):

Over many years, I edited the scanned files to correct mistakes (such as ] instead of j or q instead of g in the example above), and then in 2014-2015 with funding support from the Dieri Aboriginal Corporation, David Nathan processed my files to clean up more errors and inconsistencies and produced an XML-marked-up version, where tags in <…> encode the type of information, as in the following sample showing the pages illustrated above:

It is possible to derive various kinds of documents that display this tagged information in different ways.  Once suitably marked up, the XML document can be linked to using Extensible Stylesheet Language for Transformations (XSLT) to select and restructure structural elements, and a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) to define the display characteristics when viewed in an XML processor or a web browser.  For example, an edition can be created showing Diyari words and glosses only (a simple vocabulary list), or another using different layouts, type faces, and colours to display the data for viewing or proofing. Here is a sample for the tapana entries discussed above (generated by David Nathan in 2016):

Since 2021 I have been working with David Nathan and Ed Garrett to add further tags to the Reuther-Scherer dictionary (such as type and sub-type of notes), clean up more errors and inconsistencies, and create an index of roots which brings together all the related words that Reuther separated as different entries. We also plan to create an English to Diyari finderlist so that users can search for material in the dictionary related to particular English words or expressions. The ultimate goal of this project is to create a major reference resource which will be easily accessible on the internet, and something that will be of value to the Dieri community, and to all students of the language and culture.

Ngayani Australiamara

In 1987 Bruce Woodley, who had been a member of the famous The Seekers singing group, together with Dobe Newton, lead singer of The Bushwackers band, wrote a song (with music by Bruce Woodley) to celebrate the history and diversity of Australia called “I am Australian” (for the lyrics and other details see here).

The chorus of this song has now been translated into a number of languages, including Yawuru from the Kimberley region of Australia — there is an enthusiastic rendition by Broome Primary School students available on the ABC Kimberley Facebook page (click the picture to watch the video).

Here is a translation of the chorus of the song into Diyari, together with the original English words:

ngayani kurnu, ngarla ngayani marpu
ya mitha partyarnandru ngayani nganayi
ngayani ngapitya pardayi ya wima wangkayi yarla
nganhi, yura, ngayani Australiamara

We are one, but we are many
And from all the lands on earth we come
We share a dream and sing with one voice:
I am, you are, we are Australian

Here is what each word means in the Diyari version:

ngayani we all (including you)
kurnu one
ngarla but
ngayani we all (including you)
marpu many
ya and
mitha country, land
partyarnandru from all (made of partyarna ‘all’ and the ending -ndru ‘from’)
ngayani we all (including you)
nganayi are (made of ngana ‘to be’ and the ending -yi ‘present tense’)
ngayani we all (including you)
ngapitya dream
pardayi hold (made of parda ‘to hold’ and the ending -yi ‘present tense’)
ya and
wima song
wangkayi sing (made of wangka ‘to sing’ and the ending -yi ‘present tense’)
yarla together
nganhi I
yura you all
ngayani we all (including you)
Australiamara Australian (made of Australia and the ending mara ‘group of people who are related to one another’)

I hope readers like this Diyari version of the song.