 Good afternoon, everyone. I'm very happy to introduce our guest, this afternoon, Claire Thiel. She is from the University of Lund. She is an Australianist and an Australian. She has worked doing a lot of language documentation for the last, I'm not sure, 16 years. So she has documented or participated in documentation projects covering five different languages, mainly in Cape York Peninsula. And so this is the north and east of Australia. But this latest project that she's going to tell us about today actually is completely at the other end of the country. I'm talking about Cape York. Oh, Cape York. Yeah. I'm not talking about the east, though. But I am working in the western desert. So her interest is in semantic typology. And she's interested in how semantic categorization can illuminate, I'm reading out, so I'm sure to get it straight. So her semantic categorization can illuminate the relationship between language, culture, and cognition. And she has been part of a big project space that Max Mark Institute on this topic. And now she's also part of a documentation project of this project interested based at Long University, interested in the relationship between landscape and language. So she's taking us for a drive in the country with Nongdae and Pukul Yau. Thank you. Yes. Thank you very much, Candide. It's lovely to be here. And I am taking for you for a drive with the speakers, the last speakers of this language group in Cape York Peninsula. The project is sort of a mix of a recent work done at Lund University under a large scale, both documentation and descriptive project, and also work from an older ELDP funded documentation project. It's sort of a meeting of old and new work. And yes, I've got a very long double barrel title there. But basically, it's language documentation in a Moribund language situation, looking at landscape categorization. So let's go on this drive. So one of the many challenges of a Moribund language situation or a severe endangerment situation is recording spontaneous language using relatively natural social settings. Himmelman, in his 1996 paper, set out a very well-known program of recording many types of degrees of spontaneous language material. But this material, particularly down towards the more spontaneous end of the spectrum, remains often elusive in the more challenging language loss situations, though it is this material in particular that has the most value for true language revitalization work and also has the value of really aiding when working with speakers of many different levels of proficiency, much more so than perhaps traditional methods like grammatical elicitation or grammaticality judgments. And this point was made by Grinwald in a 2003 paper recreating some social context for natural language use can lead to improved fluency and open up the possibility of good language recordings. And it's this opening up the possibility of good language recordings and creating such scenarios as that, which has been one of the challenges in this setting that I've worked predominantly in, as Candid said, in the northeastern coast of Australia in an area called Cape York Peninsula. And the area of work is shown in this highlighted area. And you can see that it's not far from PNG in Indonesia and we'll zoom in a little bit on the coastline so you can see a little bit more clearly. The two varieties I've worked most predominantly within this group are Umpala and Kukiya'u. Kukiya'u is shown by the circled area in the north of this sort of highlighted area that shows the wider linguistic socio group associated with these varieties. And Umpala is the orange circle in the south. And then that star in the middle is Lockhart River. And that's the community where most of these people from this region settled. And for those with a bit of an Australian-esque background, it's a middle Perman group, which means it groups with Wickmunkin and well-known Wick varieties on the west coast. And when the work that I'm going to speak about was done, there were five good speakers left of these two dialects, three Umpala speakers and two Kukiya'u speakers. And now there's one Kukiya'u speaker left. So very much at the end of its life. And the vernacular now in the community is the English Lexifier Creole that bears a striking resemblance to Torres Strait Creole, unsurprisingly, given its proximity to the Torres Strait and lots of interaction up and down that coastline. OK, so the work I'm going to talk about today was the recordings were part of an endangered language documentation project that was a collaborative project between five linguists working in the area, each working in a different Perman language setting. And during this project, I wanted to record a really wide range of data. And I wanted to get more of that natural sort of spontaneous material I was talking about. And I started recording road trips with speakers. It's because I was totally fascinated by the interactions that went on in the car. So they would day trips to a certain site or a drive to a camp or just a small outing. And I noticed that people would negotiate. The speakers would negotiate the trip. They would talk about what resources we'd get and where we'd stop. And there'd be lots of conversation about it. And I just thought, wow, this is great. I'm going to rig up the car, which I did. And it was quite successful. I had a couple of microphones, a couple of recorders. And mostly it worked really well. And one of the reasons that spurred me to do this is because it was a context where naturally this micro speech community was very active, because the speakers were in a majority in the car. And they were less self-conscious than they were around the community of choosing the traditional language option from their repertoire because it was perhaps less exclusory than it was in the community setting because there there was family members that often had limited to no proficiency in the traditional language. And they might have felt a bit self-conscious. But a warning about these recordings, they're not a monolithic, homogenous record of the traditional language. Because that traditional variety is just one of several varieties within the speaker's repertoire. And they're selecting all of them throughout. So there's a mix of the traditional variety. There's the creole. And there's a mission English, which is typical of people of this era to speak. But despite this complication, and it is a complication because I still don't quite know that relationship between the traditional variety and the creole and the combination of those substrates falling into the creole or even the organization of the mixing. So there's all this richness and difficulty that comes with this. But it's really worth it because before these recordings, there were almost nothing that you could call natural language recording. And what I discovered, of course, is one of the wonderful things about these recordings is our pactful of landscape language content. People were very much oriented to the world around them. And it was fantastic. So I'd done work on landscape before, but it was much more sort of lexicographical work using archival records from the 70s, lists of place names recorded by anthropologists, plant names. And I recorded vernacular definitions and illustrative examples to feed into the dictionary. And that was all great. But anyone that's done this type of work, not in situ, will know it's really unsatisfactory way to work. And if you work with maps where people that aren't familiar with maps, there's only so far you can go. We look like we're being productive there, but it's got some problems. So what these recordings gave me is landscape categorization on the go. I could see what people actually attuned to and what resources, linguistic resources they used to talk about these aspects of the natural world that they were attuned to. And this data gave me access to really look at this and think about those sort of questions. And very quickly, I started thinking as I was getting into the landscape stuff, well, what is the nature of landscape as a domain? In familiar European languages, there is a category like geography or landscape that speakers appeal to. But is there such a thing in other language systems? Is landscape a domain much like classic semantic domains like kinship or anatomy or folk biology? So are there general design principles that organize it as a domain? Is it a discrete entity? Or is it more difficult that? Is it connected to other domains inextricably sharing semantic categories and organization? So I started to wonder about this question and it's answering this question that's the main thing of this talk. And there's a lot of very cross-linguistic evidence about this in other languages. So there's sort of juries out on how languages pattern whether landscape does largely hold as a proper semantic domain across many language systems or not. So just two data points. Nicholas Brunholt working on Jaha'i and Aslian language of the Malay Peninsula has found semantic templates that organize landscape domain. But then on the nay side, Thomas Widlock who's worked on Haikom hunter-gatherer language in Namibia has found that it's an artificial domain and largely when you look at the categories they're actually borrowed from things like settlement and migration and ethnicity and they're not sort of organized by themselves. So there's varying evidence. So let's see what happens in Umpala and Kuhiya'u. So I'm gonna zoom in on one particular road trip recording that I made and it's a road trip from the settlement where people live these days to the original place old mission settlement where they were taken to when they were forcibly removed from their country in the 1920s and 30s. And it's called Puchi Wuchi, that's the traditional language name. But most people call it old mission or old site. So a few details about this particular trip. It's a day trip, there were three speakers, several, there were two cars and several drivers cycling throughout those two cars. A grandson of one of the speakers, an art centre coordinator and myself was a two and a half hour and 15 minute car journey of approximately 70 kilometres. So it's slow going in parts. The recording was made in August of 2008 and as I said, it's a familiar territory to sort of return to home trip if you like. They hadn't been there for three or four years and as I've already flagged, it's a mix of the traditional language, Creole and Mission English. So here are the speakers in the back seat of the car. Dorothy Short, an on-polar speaker. Elizabeth Giblett, an on-polar speaker and Susan Pascoe, a Kuhi Outlaw speaker. Here's a little map showing the trip we're gonna do. You can see we do a lot of river crossings. So the star at the top is the contemporary settlement and the star down here is the old mission site that we're travelling to. And what I'm gonna do in this talk is just zoom in on some vignettes from this recording and this just roughly shows where we're gonna end up on the trip as I go through these vignettes. So what sort of territory are you moving through? Well, it's pretty spectacular, as you can see from the photos and it's highly varied as well. There's a real patchwork of ecosystems here. Tropical savanna are a little bit further inland. Wetland systems near the coast. Sand beaches running along the coast. And in particular, we do lots of river crossings. Several large river systems we cross in their tributaries, so there's a lot of wetlands. We also cross the Great Dividing Range, which is a major mountain range that runs along the east coast of Australia. So, this is the first little vignette or fragment we're going to look at. Not long into the trip, actually, just one minute after I turn on the recorder, which is about eight kilometres out of Lockhart River, Elizabeth says, Nachy Lucker getting old now. Now, I gave you a handout that has the transcripts of the fragments on it. It's not necessary to look at it, but if you want the interlinear glossing, given there's a mix of stuff going on in these, then you can, but it's also fine to follow without. So, Nachy is the word for place or country. Lucker is a pathos suffix, so it means place, poor place getting old now. And I'll just, I'm going to play some of the clips so you get a sense of the flavour of the recording. This one's particularly bad. So you can just hear it. Nachy Lucker getting old now. Hey, Dorothy says Nachy. And then actually later, 34 minutes later, you see in the bottom box, Elizabeth says something quite similar again. Nachy, old man Lucker now, after they talk about the place looking strange and unfamiliar. So old man country now, poor old man country now. Now, this expression, old man country, is part, a set of expressions that refer to the classified environment based on state and reclassified based on state as it changes. So it's not about a fixed stable classification system, it's about a changing set of states. And there's a number of these sort of state of place locutions. This Nachy Chilipu, old man place is the only one that refers to human neglect. And so speakers talk about it being a state where land has become degraded from lack of attention paid by appropriate people. And this might be lack of use of resources, lack of visitation and carrying out ceremonies in the right places, lack of burning off and that burning off fire work helps to regenerate the land. So the lack of all this work and visitation leads to this state called Nachy Chilipu, old man state. Now the other state of place locutions, sorry guys, I know I keep standing in front of the theme for people on this side. The other change of state locutions do not express their non-human influence change. So it's not human neglect. They're more about things like a cyclone comes and it damages the vegetation. Or there's a changing tides and there's a lot of debris on the beach and now it's called turned around country or rubbish country or the shape of the coastline changes due to a storm. And people use one of these other change and negative other change of state terms. But I haven't been able to tease apart the precise difference in the meaning between these terms. But one thing I can say is there's not a similar set of terms for positive state of place. So I'm just gonna look at two quotes that sort of illustrate the human behavior associated with neglected places versus non-neglected places. Now a neglected place is viewed as threatening and wild and people approach it very carefully and they might make apologies to the ancestors associated with that place. They might quickly start hunting or quickly praise the resources available there. And this quote is from an anthropologist that worked in the region in the 1970s and he recorded an old man returning to a place after many years and what he said to that place. And it sort of captures some of the emotion and the quality of people's relationship to these neglected places. Poor old country, he exclaims. What's the matter? No one been look after you. Where old people now? Look at that monk river mouth. Proper, wild, no matter Pula. Pula's the word for father's father so he's calling out to his ancestor, calling the land as his ancestor. I come back now, I don't forget you hear my voice. And in contrast, good places which are just simply referred to by the expression nachiminta which is just place modified by the regular adjective good is a place that is positive, that is ready for human use, right for human use and also currently often frequently being used by humans. And those two things are obviously connected and Dorothy, when I talked to her about what a good place is this is what she said in this sort of illustrates it as well this sort of right for human use that makes a place good place. Like say you go camp, say you might go out bush camp, watchy, which is a name of a place. You might go out camp at Martin Creek. Maybe we go talk. Oh, nampalakuaatakawachipinta namnati nati mintama wimpa mintama. We will go to watchy, she says, now it becomes good. It has good sand for camping. So notice she says now it becomes good. She goes on to say like good sand, like good place for camp, like good spot for fishing. We go there and we make it come good. So a good place is a place that's ready for human use, right for it, but also made further good by that use. And this making country come good is, as we go into this recording, is much of what I think the women are doing in the car. They're tending to the landscape. They're fostering and maintaining their relationship to it by displaying their knowledge of it. And this is what an anthropologist that's did extensive work in Central Australia has talked about is the corporeal connection between humans and land in many Aboriginal cultures. Places perceived as alive, sentient and knowing. Places sense people just much as people sense them. And so let's look more at this making them come good that the women do throughout the talk. I said earlier that I was interested in the relationship between the landscape domain and other semantic domains and possibly shared linguistic resources. Now, there are a number of other ways that human and land are tied together semantically. So recall that word, chilpul, old man. That's just a regular human classifier term for old man. And there's a full set of human classifier terms that divide up all the social world into maturation and status classification categories. And we don't see exactly the same that there's no other of these human classifier terms used elsewhere in the landscape domain, but we do see them used for animals in a sort of related way. So we see that the same semantic distinctions we get in the human classifier system are played out for key animals. So it's shared taxa across humans and key animals, dugongs, turtles, kangaroo, emu, and some duck types. There's also a number of ways of which there are human-land kin relationships. So humans and land are put in a kin relationship together with use of the regular kinship system. So for instance, land, like owned land estates are referred to as nachi pula, country from father's father. No surprise there, they're patrilineally owned. This meta label refers to that patrilineal connection. But as we've also seen in that earlier quote, they can be addressed directly as they are kin. No matter pula, I'm back here in this spot. Totems, which are inextricably connected to various places and tracks of land can also be addressed as kin. Hey, yappu, which is older brother, me here, this country belonged to we too, fella. So it's highlighting that connection between that person and that bit of land, and they are in this relationship together. There's also a moiety system that classifies all humans and it's used to gather very social behavior and marriage laws. They're called kuyun and karpai, but they also map across all land estates. Every land estate is called either kuyun or karpai and it also classifies major plants and animals. And people believe that actually there's essential shared features across every instance in either of these two moiety groups. So whether you're a human and animal or a plant, everyone that's kuyun shares some shared characteristic and everyone that's karpai shares some shared essence. So these are classification systems for humans, metaphorically or analogically extended to land in various ways, or things inextricably associated with land. They're not stable classification systems, but they're indexically grounded specific interactants. So not everyone can call that bit of land puller. Not a woman wouldn't necessarily refer to that totem as an older brother. She'd usually pick an older sister term. So that choice of term is constantly shifting based on the interactants in that situation. And what we don't see is any within category use. So this is all across humans and land mapped together in this whole and we never see kin relationships being used to map two chunks of land or two totems into a kin relationship themselves. Though this is found elsewhere in Australia where kin terms and kin diodes are used to describe associations between two places. All right, so we're gonna leave that human classification sort of behind and go on to another fragment from the recording. And one of the most crucial thing that speakers, the most frequent thing speakers do throughout this drive is they talk about the resources in the environment and the association between resources and places in particular. And they do what I call noticing and assessment sequences where they notice a resource and then assess some positive attribute of it. And by doing so, they should have so, they're a good member of the community. They know what's important and they know what's important about the exploitation of that resource. Now these are not landscape categories per se, but the sequences typically embed a place name in them because that association between resource and place is so crucial to them. So we'll just listen to this fragment. Minya is animal, mai is vegetable food. Mai, mai, mai. So what they're doing here is they notice they're coming to a place, they call out the name of it. Wachi, Wachi, it's the same place that we heard Dorothy talking about earlier when talking about a good, positive place. Wachi, Wachi, they call out and then they start talking about the resources there. Oh, look there on top, on Minya there, which is like meat, animal food. Oh, on top there, I think. Oh, it's got mai, vegetable stuff there. And then they start getting into, they're noticing a rain for us fruit and they start discussing the color of the berries on it and disagreeing about it. And these are the most frequent thing that the speakers do throughout the trip. They're doing this every few minutes and each of these noticing an assessment sequence has this type of structure. Optional place name, where are we solicited joint attention between the interactants in the car using a look or a diet dick form, point out the resource and then crucially notice an attribute of that resource. And there's loads of them all the way throughout. This top one there, taratri there, stand up, where Queen Elizabeth says, Dorothy says there's a big one there. Now a taratri, the fruit becomes right when it's mature. So noticing it's big is crucial to the exploitation of the resource. Same for the next one down. Here you're magical, which is a place name. Look, karpai, which is a tree. Here you grow everywhere. Hey, look all those young ones there. Now a karpai tree, the bark fiber is stripped and used to make grass skirts and it must be young and fresh and supple. So what they're doing really in these sequences is in pointing out the key thing that you need to know about this resource. And this sort of value placed on protest observations of plants and root descriptions has been noted elsewhere in Australia. And there's just this great quote here by David Nash talking about Walbury and Wallman Park people in Central Australia. And he's saying people use plant information as a basic mnemonic for places. They mark spots on the road, incidental spots on a well-known road. You know, they help to relocate a place. They almost use a gossip about a place. And we see much of this sort of same thing happening in this car trip as well where here we come to a place, top crossing. Now I'm here, top crossing. What animal food have we got here? And then they start discussing what animal food is there. So this sort of like what's coming up now thing and people displaying their knowledge of that place happens throughout. Okay. Moving on to the next little fragment from the recording. In this particular section they're discussing whether the area we're passing through is Umpulu or Yarei. Now these are two soil terms. And, but they have extra associations. They're not just regular soil terms. They've got a bit of baggage that come with them. So Umpulu is a sandy black soil but it's metonymically used to refer to a habitat that is where it predominates. Namely the sand dunes directly behind the coastline. And the same with the yuck, it's a white fine silk type sand and it's metonymically used. It extends to a habitat associated with this which are certain dune systems a little bit further inland in some areas. And so part of the disagreement that they're having here is about that and about some of the associations with these soil and these extended uses. And there's a complex set of soil lexicon of which a little bit's here and it really has got a lot of, there's a lot of distinctions based on coarseness and fineness, fine white sand, fineness, sand, different types of ruple. And so far several of these are attested to have this metonymic pattern where the soil type itself extends to a habitat associated with that. So Pulil mud could be used for swamp. Umpulu I just discussed, black sandy soil, sand ridge country. Pulthika fine red soil, plain country associated with this fine red soil. And then Yari is a little bit interesting and that's part of the difficulty that the speakers had in that interaction. It's also a site name, a place name specifically. So it has three uses. It's a sand type, fine white silica sand. It's an area associated with sand dune systems and it's a place name for a specific place with mythological associations. And that's sort of the canonical most powerful use of this term. And so on the car trip, when Susie says, oh is it Yari? She gets a little bit, Dorothy gets a bit concerned. Well it can't be because of these mythological associations though it is fine and white in quality. And I've just got a bit of an excerpt here from an explanation of this mythology associated with this place. So it's a metamorphosis mythology about a transformation of a diamond head stingray into white sand deposits in these amazing dune systems. They call its name Yari. There it's white as from its stomach from the stingray. This sort of shared names across different entities within the environmental world is rife throughout Oomplore and Kukiyaku. It's sort of like a zero derivation practice where the same term is used for multiple biota based on various shared characteristics. So a kidney here. Ka'uma is a kidney and porcupine fish, shared spikiness trait, up and sting tree and jellyfish, shared stingness trait. Kaku tree species and a fish species, that's based on the blossoms of this tree flower when the fish are good and fat for getting so catching. So that's sort of a spatial continuity. But yikens are really cool one here at the bottom. It's the name of an acacia tree, the place associated with an acacia tree, no derivation required, just plain use. A spear made from that acacia tree and then it's the root of a verb to straighten a spear in a fire. Now this type of pattern has been noted in Australia before by Nick Evans and it's been called signed metonomies. The sharing of names or at least roots between biological entities of patently different classes and even kingdoms on the grounds that one biological entity signals the presence or availability of another. And the most common one has been this fish tree example that I just pointed out and it's noticed actually in many places in Australia and in P&G as well apparently too. So also in Aboriginal Australia, if you work there for a little bit, you hear people use this expression, that plant is mate for that plant or that, you know, animals mate for that animal. They're mates for each other. And this is sort of like an ethno-semantic term that's about a relationship, once again usually between two distinct biota. Now umpula and kuhia'u are unusual in the regard that they have a morphine that formally expresses this relationship. And in this pair of two things that are mates, one of the mates is derived from the other using this form. So the word for sugar bag is puntu. But then the grass used to extract that sugar bag is puntu mulu. Yeah, sorry, yeah, it's a type of honey. And so people that want to scoop out the honey, it's very prized, it's very delicious. People like totally love it. The grass is a mate for the sugar bag and they refer to it by the same term. Pitul mulu is a bird dwelling in mangroves. And pitul is the word for mangrove. And so it's a habitat association. And then there's other associations. This one's probably a mythological or totemic association, malentati mulu, which is lightning with mulu on the end, which refers to a soldier crab and a stick insect. So some of them are a little bit difficult to tease out. But what's interesting about oomplon kukiyaku is the formalness of these suffix. And unsurprisingly, we see it in estate names, we see it in landscape categorization as well, using much the same pattern that we keep saying again and again, where a key characteristic feature of a place lends its name to a hole. So in the top case here, a water bird suffix with a locket even mulu, that water bird is predominantly associated with that estate. Mulu mulu, mulu is a key place within a particular estate and extended area of land and it lends its name to the hole and so forth. All right, moving on. So I've got six vignettes, we're up to number four. So we're making our way through the trip. So I did a lot of that, you know, I said I did a lot of work just sitting with people in the community, you know, asking them questions, trying to tease things out before I started doing these trips. And I got a really nice neat mapping of eco zone or habitat terms. A petition's the whole space. People were confident with it. I was like, this is fantastic. There's an area for the outer reef, deep place. There's the beach zone. There's the, you know, the sort of inter-coastal dune zone and then you move backwards and this was all great. You can tell I'm building up to say once you're out on country, people didn't really want to use these terms. In fact, what they wanted to is to productively create on the spot descriptions to describe a place based more on the task that was happening or something that was salient at the time. And these terms don't exhaustively map across the territory. It's just not the way they were. They're just productive stuff, often based on plants once again, but all sorts of things. And an hour into this trip, Dorothy says, this one, I'll call this one. Nah, chi, that's that word for place. She extends it as she thinks about what she's gonna say, tutu ancha, which is scrub hen hole place. And then, oh yeah, hey, yeah, scrub hen hole place, yeah, yeah, yeah, they all agree. That's like fabulous. They think that's totally what it is, but you would probably never get that again for that place. And this type of reproductive pattern in eco zone terminology is also noted elsewhere in Australia. And I found that Nick Evans once again was noticing this in a bit of gum work. All right, so onto the fifth little fragment. This one's on landscape features, which would be things like hill and mountain and creek and river in familiar languages like English. And if you look at a familiar language, European language, you might think that scale's gonna be really important to these terms. And that's much the received view within geography and sort of geographic sciences for sure. But what I actually found here is that on this trip, we're pulling into a, to look at something on the side of the road, there's a mound of soil there that's being pushed up by the grader and you get the term that's also used for hill. Ilka, oh, yakai, watch out, oh dear. Here, ilka, we might slip down. So oh dear, watch out, sort of exclamation. Here's a hill we might slip down, but it's really just a small mound by the side of the road. And then not that long later, you get the same term referred to as this massive, this is the Great Dividing Range, ilka's applied to that as well. Here now we climb up on top of that one-ing, that whatchamacallit now, ilka, that hill. Kanimawathinyah, we go up, ilka, kukinyakul now, that's a place name and then they keep talking. So this term is really just a term for any elevated feature of any material or any scale. And many of the core landscape features in Umpla and Kuhiya are like this. So maya, the word here, which would be initially glossed as cliff and if you looked in a dictionary or a set of old field notes, that's how it would be glossed. But when you work with speakers, you find actually just the smallest side of something that's vertical like this is maya as well. Same for mochi, the backbone of an elevated feature, an elongated, elevated feature. Kulu is for any type of depression. It can be a hole, it can be a massive valley, it can be the deeper area of the outer reef and so forth. And this really speaks to the definition of landscape, the received definition of landscape as visually prominent large scale and distal backdrop drop. Because of course some of these smaller instantiations of these features could be kicked over with your foot or could disappear tomorrow. So it's slightly different view of landscape. All right, so the last little fragment. This is another thing along with those noticing and assessment sequences that the women do that is very common. They list place names. They list the places to come on the track. They list the places we've been. They repeat them and they collaboratively check the order and the relationship between the places spatially. And this is very important. They do this repetitively. And this is also a feature of narratives and songs. So it's not just a feature of being in situ. It's just a feature of that importance of the network of places rather than places viewed as an isolated name. And now lots of people might be familiar within Australia there's this idea of a song line which is a track associated with an ancestral being or a spirit and it moved across a place and it made various sites and created them and it's very culturally salient. And this track it moved is a song line and often has a name and it has many names on it. These types of sort of very cosmologically important song lines do not exist in this part of Australia. Not at all. There's not one instance of them. But what we do get is these well-worn paths of travel. It's a much more secular sort of system. And so let's play this fragment as they do a little bit of this place name listing. Danger Creek this side, Nanda that side, Nanda then Danger Creek, then your Magiko, then Kukinjuku, then Kukinjuku, then Bald Hill and so forth. After rain, Danger Creek this side, Nanda, then Nanda, then Danger Creek, then one in another place, then Kukinjuku. So while we're on place names, let's look at how they're structured. These two of these examples here, two of the language place names, when you look at their composition, they're just using regular nominal derivational morphology. Commodative marker, genitive marker, nominalizer, just regular old stuff. And when doing a little bit of work on a corpus of 232 place names, you find this is largely the case. So there's lots of these bare nouns. Like this is this zero derivation I keep talking about where just a regular bare noun is used as a place name. So the noun here for cassowary is used for a place, a mountain and an area associated with that mountain near the Lockhart River settlement. Wattle, a grass species is also a point on a bay. And so this is quite common, 14% of the instances. Commodative marker, which is like a having type suffix, this is really common right across Aboriginal Australian people talk about it all the time. Plants associated, a name comes from a plant or a resource associated with a place. You stick the having suffix on it, it literally means place that has that grass, place that has that tree and they're usually very transparent. And usually there's a lot of that stuff at that place so it's no surprise at all. There's a few instances of compounds and clauses. What we do find is some special morphology making up 29% of this small corpus. And these two suffixes, we're just talking about those songlines and the movements of ancestral beings. Well you don't get those songlines, those tracks of movement, but you do get the movement of ancestral beings coded in these suffixes. Muta is a place where an ancestral being sat down and that place is named after it. Nunima is a place where that ancestral being travelled through. So the system doesn't totally disregard this pattern found elsewhere in Australia, it just doesn't have exactly the same way that it expresses it. There's a 24% unanalyzable names and there's really varying, this is a big thing in place name studies, right? What's analyzable and what's not? So I tossed up some transparency figures, comparable ones in Australia, really big variation. Also depends on the number of place names you've collected and how you get them so it's a little bit of a funny thing. So I'm going to finish up on a really nice little bit of something that happens in the recording. Is throughout the trip they sing songs and the songs are sparked off by, or are associated with places and they're sort of sparked off from being in that place. And this song here is a song about Nanda which is an outstation that we've just seen on the list of names actually that we pass. And an outstation is a place where men were often sent to take care of livestock, cattle and muster and this is about 20 kilometres outside of the old mission site and this song was composed by the uncle of Susie, one of the women in the car and it's about leaving to go and work at the outstation in Nanda. Daybreak we leave for Nanda by and by they wait for us you look from that hill to the deep blue outer reef so they're up on the great dividing range on their way to that outstation and they can see out to the ocean and then he lists two names, the places you pass through. And as we go along the road and we're near this place they start seeing this song in snatchers and it's sort of embedded in one of these lists names and includes a sort of list itself. Yeah and after we're going to go for Kalputin Hill now she starts talking about the next place we're going to go to which is the place in the song itself. So just some final wrapping up comments. You can see by doing these recordings and trying to get some situated contextually rich information that there was a lot of Creole and Mission English in there, probably the majority but it had rich documentary and descriptive value for really understanding how landscape languages are used and understanding some of the semantics of these traditional categories that were embedded within this communicative event and we also saw that landscape to return to that question what's the nature of landscape as a semantic domain we saw that landscape was ultimately within Umpolara and Kuhia'u closely intertwined with the linguistic classification of plants, animals, human states, spiritual and cultural belief systems so we again and again saw zero derivation, metonymic uses shared names across many different types of biological categories and landscape features and this speaks to this cultural belief that I pointed to about this corporeal connection between humans and land of a sort of culturally assumed idiom whereby people in the environment are entities of one aspect of a greater whole and I'm not the first person to say this in Australia by any means and here's a quote by David Wilkins talking about our indonation of place and he says here in the middle of this going to the middle of this a name place is a point within a network of relations and it's these relations that give it definition, these relations are not only or even mainly with other places but also with people and things through kinship and totemic affiliation and the language reflects these associations in levels of lexicon grammar and discourse and that's also what I believe is true for ompala and kukia and yes there we're arriving at the old site in this picture and that's it fascinating talk I'm struck, so I work in West Africa and whenever I listen to Australian language I'm struck by many similarities in this association and I was also struck by something that you said in the beginning when you described your recording method that it's I mean for you in a particularly more important situation that it's quite difficult that people are very self-conscious when you try to record languages where they're a little more exposed now this is and this was a good way of getting this very natural and this is something I've been thinking about a lot in the context of our own work on indigenous multilingualism in small societies because so there as well language is associated with one meaning if you speak a language basically it's like it's very similar to the Australian language it sounds like it, yeah but it's not really passed down from you know and so people move of course and I speak other languages which of course used to also be the case in Australia at least until the very recent past and so when you move in and you're interested in the language as you know the language of the land that is not what people actually speak so you really put them on the spot it's a register that is limited to particular context of individual context you know with libation, sacrifice to the ancestors spirits associated with natural entities etc and it may happen that you have a family that is particularly homogeneous and that language is used in a variety of situations but otherwise language is as pragmatic and mixed as you would show in your recordings so that dualism is systematic as well because you know through the association of languages with laices we also regulate the relationships between people of course, you know how people marry how they have rights to pass through etc and so that is something that I often find out in language work I'm getting to the end no, no, no I'm like yes, yes, that all sounds very familiar and like what I experience this language is endangered and we need to preserve it and they think of reusing and revitalizing the the language but it and but you cannot use the actual languages to revitalize that language yes, because it's it's a dualism because it's so mixed and you don't respond well to it to use it as a language revitalization tool yes, exactly, people see that this is well, no, no that's not what I was trying to say so let me try it again so what people often see endangered is the pure languages associated with the language but that is to a large extent a fiction because the language it's a kind of proctotrack that's never fully instantiated what is real is the language mixed with the flags the many populations that who own different languages have with each other yes but that you cannot use to revitalize the prototype that's right, because of people's but at the same time even if you try to expand the use of the prototype don't actually protect the ecology because it's the sense yes, I would totally agree yes, there was multilingualism in this area before yes, would the lots of the elders be comfortable with this material being used as a representation of their traditional language categories not so much uncomfortable with it the fact that the recordings were so informal was the value of them but if we were doing proper landscape work and once we get to a site and I pull out the video camera it's a whole different ball game things are rehearsed, people are very self-conscious because they're on record now and there's a lot of cultural weight given to that and they're worried about getting it wrong especially because they're in situ remember everything I said about how important it is to foster that relationship with the land that's perceived as sentient you don't want to get it wrong because then what are the consequences of that so it's highly pressurized so I have a lot of that but I found it actually less rich and of less value than this but that's the material that people would be like to have used that high cultural value high cultural prestige material that's what people want for language revitalization but it's sort of the wrong way to go about it, there's got to be an element of that but really what you want is a focus of communication interaction and people to be comfortable with mixing things together as would have been to some degree naturally the case yeah, that just all just totally rings true and it's a difficult mix to deal with as a researcher and obviously you want to be doing a bit of all those things to get stuff for the community and also to get a good repertoire as well but I really found like this was the richer stuff I felt like I really went further with the semantics and the true nature of the system and how everything hangs together through these recordings here's a similar term I think it is which is just the context elevated of any feature it's a little less extensive actually than umplor and cuquia it's just a small set of terms but yeah, scale certainly isn't the main feature within that system and he sort of overtly says that no, I'd say it's a wider phenomenon if you actually look at the landscape language literature then Carol and Amira working with the seri of Mexico also notes the same phenomenon a Loretta O'Connor working on, is it Chontal? Chontal, yeah she notes a very similar thing various people find it more systematic or not systematic but this idea of scale not being a key semantic driving force in landscape features I think actually if you did a proper typological survey you'd find that more common than not is my sense from it, yeah I think there's another aspect to it which is it's a survival mechanism completely, yeah other places and you have the right order then you can find where to get food yeah, yeah, yeah, I'd agree impressive though in the 1930s Norman Tyndale was in the Simpson Desert and met a group of Aboriginal people who happened to go back a year later and happened to run into the same family and they told him over 200 names of the places that they had been during the 12 months listing them off in exact chronological order where they had been so I mean you contrast that to the song lines issue but actually for my experience people know those names that's where you there's still travel routes the waterholes are usually in Central Australia they're usually they have these mythological associations and they're on a song line but they're the place you travel and they're the place where you survive so yeah it was a bit of a contrast but really it's still a mnemonic for travelling and for survival and resources just one's a secular one with no associations and one is one that's really loaded with spiritual stuff but ultimately that's sort of cosmological stuff still encodes resource information as well just has this other layer so yeah I do agree that it's a similar function yeah yeah yeah great it's about two or three hours we were going to a particular place this was with the west focus in South Australia and we walked around and around in circles with our Aboriginal guides getting more and more frustrated and so finally one of the guys realised that there was a very large tree that had grown up since he had last been there and he was totally confused about where this place was because the tree what shouldn't have been there and when he figured that out he literally he just stood there and he banged and he just walked straight to where the place was it was really astounding to see how they mapped the you know the floor yeah looks like you've got to follow up follow up on that yes and so many languages in the area where I work have non-classification systems and they incorporate corporate silo shape and so it's often said about non-class systems that they classify the non the reference and that is definitely not true in particular for trees and plants that are landmarks so very often you ask so is this a tree or is this a shrub but you have to show me the tree before I can tell you because they are really and people recognise photos that's also very well known among other varieties they recognise photos of the tree as you know you can never cheat if you are trying to do an administrative dictionary you focus on another village only 20 kilometres away if that was not acceptable wow that's really cool it is like the trees are so yeah amongst the Oompa and Kuya I mentioned this sort of moiety group classification Kuyan and Kapai group and that people plants and animals and land and everyone's thrown in together into these two groups and it is this bilateral classification of everything that's meaningful about the world with these underlying folk beliefs about what organises this part of it people point to things like tree bark and striations on leaves and water quality associated with the place and they are things small features of the element of the landscape that show patterns and then for humans they connect that to the lines on you know the palm lines on your hand well that a certain way and that makes you Kuyan or Kapai and that's a bit like the pattern and the bark on the tree and the colouring of people's hair and the texture of it whether it's curly or not which is a thing in this area that's also a thing and people are very key on these small differences of their cultural salience as part of this big bilateral grouping that divides the world up okay so for most of them I had like a Garmin GPS so I had a track log and I made points waypoints along the way so that's how I kept track of where we were I didn't video record it because it was I would love to but I need a proper grant where I can rig a car with proper things that video cameras clip into with a certain like fish eye lanes and a certain angle I didn't have the resources for that so what I did was I had literally a zoom audio recorder and a JVC video camera I didn't do any video to the lens cap on I had two road microphones good microphones with dead cats on them and then I made them in two different locations in the car I literally got like a photo copy paper box like a small box and I put like towel and everything around them now there was some overheating problems in at hotter times of the year doing this but as a general rule it didn't work but I didn't cause a problem but I just wanted to pad it from some of the corrugations and just make it a bit cocooned and that seemed to work you know as long as the microphone was sticking out the cameras protected the microphones sitting on a little like bed of stuff it somehow seemed to most of it was transcribable yeah does that answer your question? oh I took some pictures out the window yeah you know whenever I thought there was something important going on a bit like the waypoint but you know it's a bit haphazard it's not full documentation of every element it's just what we could do we were on a genuine trip and there's other demands on that when I'm driving sometimes I'm not you know there's some things to attend to you do what you can in between everything else that's going on it doesn't really I haven't mined this data for grammar of space stuff though you totally could because there's heaps of it there so yeah I haven't really interrogated it for that but it's certainly present in the material the system itself is not that far from guviyimidia so it is one of these absolute spatial reference systems and yeah yeah obviously you know any sort of motion event or movement through space the endpoint or the destination that would be relevant to the sort of like just the analysis of it but I can't off the top of my head other than I'd say on the small scale aspect of it the landscape features being right down to the small scale that spatial reference system is the same you know it's famous in Aboriginal Australia that you can use directional terms right down to table top space so this sort of disregard for scale and sort of that you know there isn't this geography isn't this out there distant visually prominent thing the same resources associated with that large scale geographical space are at work here on the table top with small scale space or the campground where you're sitting I'd say it sort of fits into that whole model of what's going on where the version of landscape is a sort of unfamiliar one and it isn't carved out in the same way as we think it is in familiar languages yeah yeah of course the transcription conventions are a bit awful in this is that one okay that one's not yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah no of course yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yep yeah yeah mmm mmm mmm mmm mmm mmm mmm mm hm mm roses I was wondering, do we ever had an instance where people themselves did transcribe discourse? No, there's no one with any literacy in the traditional language or in Creole actually because it's not an officially knowledge form. I mean, for instance, in transcribers and people also go to school and out there and then they use the standard literacy that they have learned and transferred. They use one leader, what you would be doing for English versus Australian kind of. And so then all the boundaries disappear because they use one lead standard for all romantic ones. Which is really interesting in terms of what it means as to the ontological standards of... Yeah, for sure. I haven't actually in these transcripts tried to tease apart the three varieties. In part because it's really impossible to do that. And also there isn't been any research on the Creole. I hope to be doing that myself shortly. But so there isn't an orthography in a way to represent it. The Creole form, things that I know are as best I can in the messiness of this say, well, that's emerged as part of the Creoleization process that form. They are represented using more English type writing, which is highly problematic. So you could use the IPA and just transcribe everything using one standard. But this is a professional boundary, right? Even though maybe they are not really present. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'd agree, I'd agree. No, but I mean, I was actually what they were doing. So I'm not saying that they were talking about my faith, and they were asking what you were aware of. They didn't really, yeah, they didn't really have any knowledge of the... Yeah. Yeah, yeah. In this community the term Creole is only about familiar for two or three years, actually. People are just starting to recognize what they're speaking is a little bit different. And actually people that know, say Denise Angelo is in part responsible for this growing awareness because she was working for the Queensland Education Department and going up into Cape York. And there is some growing sense that people are saying, and when politicians come, people in recent years, even before the term Creole started to gain some use amongst community members, people did start to recognize that what they spoke was really, really not commensurate with English. And that they would, you know, when politicians came they would do something in their way of speaking, they'd say. And then, you know, into big English or standard English. So there is a little bit of acknowledgement of that amongst the sort of community leaders of the community. But outside that context there's virtually no awareness of this. There's awareness that people don't speak the traditional language. And the older people are able to switch into the traditional language or were when there were more of them. But yeah, there it's different, yeah. I think that's eventually going to happen. It's starting to, the beginnings of it becoming politicized and awareness is starting to happen in this part of Cape York. And of course people are having more, the schools having more interaction with the Torres Strait as well. There's a little bit more connection in a current scheme going on within the Education Department. And this might be facilitating some of that awareness too. Could be in some places, but I think that the observation of this in Central Australia as being a key part of what's happening there makes it unlikely that all of it's accountable to that. But there may be elements of that for sure, for sure. It's systematic present through Australia. And also our understanding of how uniform semantics are through Permanent Languages in Australia and even non-Permanent Languages provides a good indication that this is a natural part of the system. Yeah, yeah. I think so. Yeah, yeah. Well there's such patches of work, but I would like to do a bigger typological thing actually on some of this stuff. There's little things, but you have to dig a bit. Like it's in a grammar or in a paper. It's a section of it. So yeah, a little bit of a collation of some of those patterns. And of course most of the landscape stuff is focused on place names in Australia of which there is lots of similarities with too. But yeah, I find that's why I dropped in those little hints of where I'd noticed in the literature similar things being noticed elsewhere in Australia because I'm curious on how widespread that is. And also it creates things like, in response to the last question, it helps bolster the sense interpretation of the data too. I was just wondering, in general, when you're in the field, do you usually do recording? Occasionally I took handwritten notes, but to be honest these trips were usually my duties were a multi-role sort of duties and I usually didn't have much time to take notice because people were saying, pass me a Mandarin as I was going, oh no, the tape's about to run out and I need to do that, I've got a stopwatch going for when the tape runs out so I can change it and things like that. So usually notes were limited on these trips, but in other situations, lots of notes when things were perhaps less appropriate to start recording straight away, like for instance you're doing one of these sort of more formal recordings inside somewhere and people are just sort of like warming up and they're not comfortable to have the recorder on yet, well I'm trying to get what I can down in a notebook because that's a little less intrusive but actually that negotiation of it is what I really, really want to record but sort of unable to most of the time. So a mix depending on the pressures on me, what I can do, usually though in that case I would try to write them up very quickly because usually mostly when I'm taking notes, usually I'm under pressure and they're quite messy and so all these beautiful written hand notes I look at from anthropologists and people that worked early and feel, I don't know how they did it but you know mine are like illegible to me a week later so it's like later that night I'm at home at 11 o'clock at night, bleary-eyed and I'm