That's some interesting reading. The second link doesn't work for me.
I started with Beuelah Lowe's Gupapuyngu grammer books and CDs -- how else could I learn Yolngu Matha from across the ocean?
From Emma Kowal:
Quote:
"We were randomly assigned one of 8 skin names, and set about building a family tree of the class. We found out who we could marry and who we couldn’t speak to. We pondered over the cyclical kinship charts, where you call your great-grandmother your child, and your great-grandchild your mother. We wondered, I still wonder, what it means when you call your husband’s sister’s husband your grandchild."
While reading Turner's "
A Black Civilization" I found myself resorting to building family trees to try to understand familial relationships and names. It is quite complicated.
From Emma Kowal:
Quote:
"Waymamba taught us the sounds of Yolngu Matha, the retroflexed T that sounds like an ‘rt’, like watu, dog, the elusive ‘ng’ that emerges from the back of the throat, heard in the word Yolngu, and the glottal stop that sounds like a hiccup. We tried to mimic her lilting voice, traversing the syllables of unfamiliar country."
I still think that the "hard tongue" technique is a mirror of the language, even though others don't think so. Maybe I'll find an ethno-musicology forum to debate the matter.
From Emma Kowal:
Quote:
"At first, we flooded her with questions, often being met with a bemused smile. Michael Christie had kindly warned us, ‘If you don’t get an answer to a question, just leave it or go back later on and ask quietly.’ As the term went on, we learnt how to work together. She, already versed in how we thought, waited patiently as over the weeks we learnt how to ask her questions in the right way."
Before I traveled to Arnhem Land I had hoped to find some guides to Yolngu manners and cultural. There aren't any. Oh, well, I hope that I didn't offend anyone in Birritjimi.
From Emma Kowal:
Quote:
As our class started to make up stories to tell each other, we came across the Yolngu sense of time. Bonggungu means both ‘tomorrow’ and ‘sometime soon’, and if you want to describe something that happened three weeks ago, the closest phrase means ‘nearly yesterday’.
Impatient westerners might have problem getting used to Yolgnu time, just like they have trouble getting used to Mexican "mañana" time.
Great stuff, thanks.
