Mbabaram language

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Not to be confused with the Bambara language.
Mbabaram
Barbaram
RegionQueensland
EthnicityMbabaram
Extinct1979[citation needed]
Pama–Nyungan
  • Southern Paman
    • Mbabaram
Language codes
ISO 639-3vmb
Glottologmbab1239
AIATSIS[1]Y115
ELPMbabaram
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Mbabaram (Barbaram) is an

R. M. W. Dixon
described his hunt for a native speaker of Mbabaram in his book Searching for Aboriginal Languages: Memoirs of a Field Worker. Most of what is known of the language is from Dixon's field research with speaker Albert Bennett.

Classification

Until

genetic relationships
between Mbabaram and other languages as unproven.

Aboriginal Australian
tribes around Cairns

Geographic distribution

Mbabaram was spoken by the

Mbabaram tribe in Queensland, southwest of Cairns (17°20′S 145°0′E / 17.333°S 145.000°E / -17.333; 145.000
).

Nearby tribal dialects were

Warungu. While these were often mutually intelligible
, to varying degrees, with the speech of the adjacent tribes, none were even partially intelligible with Mbabaram. The Mbabaram would often learn the languages of other tribes rather than vice versa, because Mbabaram was found difficult.

Phonology

Vowels

Front Central Back
High
 i ɨ u
Low-mid
 ɛ ɔ
Low
 a

Consonants

Peripheral Laminal Apical
Bilabial Velar Palatal Dental Alveolar Retroflex
Plosive b ɡ      ɡʷ ɟ
d̪
d      dʷ
Nasal
 m ŋ ɲ
n̪
n      nʷ
Lateral
l
Rhotic
r
 		ɻ
Semivowel w j

Phonological history

Vowels

Mbabaram would have originally had simply three vowels, /i a u/, like most Australian languages, but several changes occurred to add /ɛ ɨ ɔ/ to the system:

  • [ɔ] developed from original */a/ in the second syllable of a word if the first syllable began with */ɡ/, */ŋ/, or */wu/.
  • [ɛ] developed from original */a/ in the second syllable of a word if the first syllable began with */ɟ/. (It may have also occurred with /ɲ/ or /ji/, but no examples are known.)
  • [ɨ] developed from original */i/ in the second syllable of a word if the first syllable began with */ɡ/, */ŋ/, or */w/.
  • [ɨ] also developed from original */u/ in the second syllable of a word if the first syllable began with */ɟ/, */ɲ/, or */j/.

The first consonant of each word was then dropped, leaving the distribution of /ɔ ɛ ɨ/ unpredictable.

Word for "dog"

Mbabaram is famous in linguistic circles for a striking coincidence in its vocabulary. When Dixon finally managed to meet Bennett, he began his study of the language by eliciting a few basic nouns; among the first of these was the word for "dog". Bennett supplied the Mbabaram translation, dog. Dixon suspected that Bennett had not understood the question, or that Bennett's knowledge of Mbabaram had been tainted by decades of using English. But it turned out that the Mbabaram word for "dog" was in fact dúg,[2] pronounced almost identically to the Australian English word (compare true cognates such as Yidiny gudaga, Dyirbal guda, Djabugay gurraa and Guugu Yimidhirr gudaa, for example[3]). The similarity is a complete coincidence: the English and Mbabaram languages developed on opposite sides of the planet over the course of tens of thousands of years. This and other false cognates have been cited by typological linguist Bernard Comrie as a caution against deciding that languages are related based on a small number of lexical comparisons.[4]

References

  1. ^ Y115 Mbabaram at the Australian Indigenous Languages Database, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies
  2. JSTOR 611096
    .
  3. ISBN 978-1-58811-512-6
    . Retrieved 2010-01-08.
  4. doi:10.4324/9781315644936-1
    .

Bibliography

External links

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