Bla bla bla

[nooj]

I have decided to re-study Sanskrit. It will have to take a backseat in comparison to living languages, but I still want to put away some time into doing it. It has been now 3 years since I last cracked open my Sanskrit books, so my level is decidedly dusty. That said, with the use of a dictionary, I can still read Sanskrit. Here is something to help inaugurate this intention.

It is an excerpt from The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment, also known as the Lam Rim Chen Mo in Tibetan. It is Tsongkhapa’s magnus opus, one of the greatest thinkers in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

In this excerpt, Tsongkhapa provides commentary on some verses of a work by another (somewhat legendary) Buddhist philosopher, Shantideva. Shantideva composed the Bodhisattvacharyāvatāra, ‘Engaging in the Bodhisattva Deeds’, a masterful summary of the Mahayana tradition, a true classic.

Engaging in the Bodhisattva Deeds says:

If I am never satiated by sensual desires,

Which are like honey on a razor’s edge,

How could I be satiated with merit,

Whose fruition is happiness and peace?

kāmairna tṛptiḥ saṃsāre kṣuradhārāmadhūpamaiḥ|

puṇyāmṛtaiḥ kathaṃ tṛptirvipākamadhuraiḥ śivaiḥ||64||

कामैर्न तृप्तिः संसारे क्षुरधारामधूपमैः।

पुण्यामृतैः कथं तृप्तिर्विपाकमधुरैः शिवैः॥६४॥

Develop an attitude of being insatiable, thinking, “Indulging in sensual pleasures is like licking honey off the sharp blade of a razor; it is the source of a little sweetness, but it slices up the tongue. If I cannot get enough of this experience, which gives me great suffering for the sake of just a slight, temporary pleasure, what sense could there be in feeling that I have had enough of the collections of merit and sublime wisdom, which give flawless, infinite happiness, both immediate and long-term?”

Thus, in order to bring to completion the virtuous activities in which you have engaged, enter them as a sun-scorched elephant enters a pleasing lotus pond at noon. Train in this attitude until you produce it.

Engaging in the Bodhisattva Deeds states:

Thus, in order to finish the work,

I shall enter into it just as

An elephant, scorched by the midday sun,

Comes upon a pond and plunges in.


tasmātkarmāvasāne'pi nimajjettatra karmaṇi|

yathā madhyāhnasaṃtapta ādau prāptasarāḥ karī||65||


तस्मात्कर्मावसानेऽपि निमज्जेत्तत्र कर्मणि।

यथा मध्याह्नसंतप्त आदौ प्राप्तसराः करी॥६५॥

One of the difficulties with reading Sanskrit texts is that at least until the 18th century, neither Buddhist nor Hindu texts were meant to be read. Unlike China, where the printing press took off early and literature was consumed en masse by a readership who used books made out of paper, in India, oral/aural memorisation remained the main means by which people accessed literature. This wasn't because India didn't have paper, India had it since the 13th century at least, and the Middle East by the 9th century, but the Indian scholarly class simply rejected it for whatever reason, preferring to write using palm leaves or other local material as well as traditional memorisation, right up until modernity.

Indian philosophers write in verses, which obviously helps for memorisation, and they can be highly elliptical, to the point where people have a hard time understanding their points. The reason why is that the 'text', as it were, is to be accompanied by an oral explanation, from a teacher to a student, who would be pointing out what this verse means. This is how it still works in Tibetan monasteries.

That oral component was sometimes put into word as a written commentary, but not always. By only reading the written text, you lose a lot of that meaning. I remember reading an English translation (by Jay L. Garfield) of one of Nagarjuna's works, the foundational thinker of Madhyamaka branch of philosophy. The modern day scholars were trying to reconstruct his thought system, on the basis of each of these brief, extremely cryptic lines. As well as using the aforementioned written commentaries, and help from the existing Buddhist oral tradition as it exists today. This is very different from reading a European philosopher like Hegel, whose philosophy you can more or less just read in his books.

I love the vivid imagery. Intellectual dissipation is like licking honey on a razor's edge, I know well that sweet-painful sensation!

[nooj]

I was cycling home today and I stopped at the lights. Next to me, some construction workers were digging up the road. I asked one of them what language he was speaking. I imagined it was from somewhere in West Africa, but I was not sure. He told me that it was Susu, a language I had never heard (of) before. Indeed it is a Mandé language from West Africa, spoken in the Republic of Guinea. The workers were busy and I did not want to take up more of their time, so I could not stick around to learn more.

But I did talk to the barista at a café and learned some Sinhalese expressions.

ආයුඛෝවන් - āyubūvan 'hello'
ඉස්තුති - istuti 'thank you'
සමාවත්ත - samāvena 'excuse me, sorry'

It makes me irrationally happy when I hear other languages being spoken around me, on the bus, on the train, in the streets. I find that most people, provided you don't bother them while they are working or in an obvious rush, are happy to chat about their languages, and are reciprocally interested in yours. This week, aside from Susu and Sinhalese, I have discussed the topic of language with speakers of Cypriot Greek (the owners of my local pizza shop) and Gujarati and Malayalam (the librarian at my local library). I wish we could integrate the topic of multiculturalism and multilingualism in a more fundamental way into our society, starting with schools. Imagine, if you were in a classroom where 50% of the class spoke another language at home, how interesting it would be to learn about the languages of your classmates! And yet I don't recall ever doing anything like that in my classes in primary or high school.

[nooj]

A bit of an article (the full copy is available in a printed magazine) that I found interesting, about the use of Breton to 'quiet' elderly people suffering from Alzheimer's and who are now reverting back to their mother language. But the trouble is that the language is only spoken by a few carers, so they're not getting the psychological comfort that their native language brings them.

Simon Kerzerho est bénévole pour une association qui intervient au sein de l’hôpital d’Auray, où il se rend régulièrement. Un jour, en fin d’après-midi, alors qu’il traverse le couloir de la maison de retraite, il croise un résident qui s’accroche à sa chaise. “N’eo ket c’hoazh an noz !” (il ne fait pas nuit), hurle-t-il à l’aide-soignante qui tente en vain de le raccompagner à sa chambre pour le coucher. “Je lui ai répondu en breton, lui disant que, certes, il ne faisait pas encore nuit, mais qu’il était quand même temps d’aller se coucher”, raconte Simon Kerzerho. Apaisé, l’homme a alors lâché sa chaise et a suivi l’aide-soignante, soulagée. Depuis, le bénévole intervient tous les lundis à la maison de retraite Pratel-Izel, à Auray. Le personnel de la structure, conscient de ce que cela pouvait apporter aux résidents, l’a sollicité pour y animer des ateliers de conversation en breton.

En cette douce après-midi de novembre, ils sont ainsi une quinzaine, rassemblés devant des gâteaux et une tasse de café. Certains regards sont éteints, mais d’autres s’illuminent quand Simon prend la parole. Les souvenirs ressurgissent : le travail à l’usine, à Ploemel, où on mettait le poisson en conserve. L’école où on se rendait en bateau, à Locoal. La messe que le curé donnait en breton, à Pluvigner. Quelques bribes de chants, des rires à l’évocation de bêtises d’enfants, résonnent. “Cet atelier fait beaucoup de bien à nos résidents”, assure Élodie Le Clanche, l’animatrice de la maison de retraite. “C’est un moment très attendu. Ces personnes dont le breton est la langue maternelle parlent entre elles, elles sont contentes. Certaines qui ne s’expriment plus beaucoup le font de nouveau. Une dame très désorientée parvient à se canaliser, à rester assise à écouter pendant une heure. On voit qu’elle comprend, qu’elle se situe mieux. Et puis, cet atelier qui est parfois ouvert au public crée du lien avec l’extérieur.”

Simon Kerzerho is a volunteer for an association that works with the hospital of Auray, where he goes regularly. One day, towards the end of the afternoon, he was walking along the passage of the elderly home when he met a resident who was gripping onto his chair. "It's not night yet!", the resident was yelling at his female carer, who tried fruitlessly to help him back to his room to sleep. "I replied to him in Breton telling him that of course it wasn't night yet, but it was still time to go to sleep", recalls Simon. Calmed down by him, the man let go of his chair and followed the relieved carer. Since then, the volunteer comes every Monday to the elderly home Pratel-Izel at Auray. The people working there have asked him to preside over some Breton conversation workshops, knowing how much this could help the residents.

On this pleasant November afternoon, there are about fifteen of them grouped together with cakes and a cup of coffee. The faces of some are blank, but others light up when Simon speaks. The memories float back: working at the factory in Ploemel, where fish used to be preseved. The school, which had to be reached by boat, at Locoal. The mass that the priest used to give in Breton at Pluvigner. Some fragments of songs, laughter rings out at the recollection of dumb things done as a child. "This workshop does a lot of good for our residents", affirms Élodie Le Clanche, the organiser for the home. "It's a moment that people wait for. Those who have Breton for their mother tongue speak among themselves, they're pleased. Some who don't talk much anymore do so again. There's one very confused lady and she manages to focus, she sits still and listens for an hour. You can see that she understands, that she feels better. And this workshop which is sometimes open to the public creates links with the outside world".

Here are some recollections I have taken from the French language forum Babel:

Ce sujet me touche aussi puisqu'à la fin de sa vie, feu mon arrière-grand-mère ne parlait plus que le breton; elle s'est éteinte en octobre 2001, à l'âge de 97ans dans une maison de retraite à Rostrenen.

Je ne pourrai pas répondre à la question concernant la prise en charge des locuteurs bretons monolingues dans les hôpitaux. Même si l'on dit que la dernière brittophone monolingue s'est éteinte en la personne de madame Bourdonnais, reste que beaucoup de personnes très âgées bilingues perdent l'usage du français avec l'extrême vieillesse. Cependant, il est certain que ce type de cas risque de disparaître bientôt, le nombre de personnes ayant pour langue maternelle le breton et n'ayant parlé que cette langue jusqu'à un âge avancé étant rarissimes, étant donné l'effort fait dés les année 1920-1930 pour interdire aux petits brittophones l'usage de la langue de leurs pères.

Quoiqu'il en soit, je regrette qu'en octobre 2001 je n'aie pas mieux connu le breton pour parler à cette femme digne qui offrait toujours avec amour des friandises à ses arrière-petits-enfants dans sa mansarde de Saint-Nicodème. Je regrette qu'une fois la maladie survenue, je n'ai pas pu lui dire mon amour. Elle était, dans l'agonie, le symbole vivant du naufrage du breton et de notre culture ancestrale. Puisse Dieu l'avoir accueillie auprès de Lui, dans sa grande miséricorde.

Je prie pour toi, mamm-gozh...

This subject touches me as well, because towards the end of her life, my great-grandmother spoke only Breton; she passed away on October 2001, at the age of 97 years old in an elderly home at Rostrenen.

I can't respond to the question about how monolingual Breton speakers are taken care of in hospitals. Even though it is said that the last monolingual Breton speaker died with madame Bourdonnais, lots of very elderly bilingual people lose the use of their French as they get towards their latter days. But certainly this kind of case will probably disappear soon, the number of people who have Breton as a mother tongue and who only spoke this language up until a later age, is extremely small. Given the work done since the 1920s-30s to ban little Breton speakers from using the language of their ancestors.

Anyway, I'm sad that I did not better know Breton in October 2001 to speak it with that worthy woman who always used to dote on us her great grand children with lollies in the attic of Saint-Nicodème. I regret that once the disease struck, I had not been able to tell her I loved her. On her death bed, she was the living symbol of the death of Breton and our ancestral culture. I pray that God took her to His bosom, in His great mercy. I pray for you, grandmother.

Ma grand-mère de 98 ans parle breton le matin en se réveillant : « kouske' mat 'meus » dit-elle en se croyant au pays. Elle vit à Paris pourtant depuis la fin de la guerre. Heureusement, elle m'a appris quelques mots autrefois et on arrive à communiquer. Un peu...

My grandmother is 98 years old and speaks Breton when she wakes up: "I've slept well!" she says, still believing herself to be in her country (Bretagne). She's been living in Paris however since the end of the war. Luckily, she taught me once some words, and we can still communicate. A little...




In Korean, we say the exact same thing, for example I could say after waking up, 잘 잤다! 'I slept well!'.

I wonder if I too will be like the men and women of these anecdotes in 50 years time. Where layer by layer the languages I have accrued over my life slip away, leaving only the first language, the one I was raised with.

And yet by that point my parents will be dead, and I will most likely have no one to speak Korean to. It is a sad thought to think that I will die alone with no one to talk to or understand me. But for a Breton speaker, the pain must be more acute thinking or knowing that your language and your way of life will die with you.

[nooj]

I am reminded of a short story I read a long time ago, when I was a kid, by the Australian author David Malouf, one of our greatest writers. It is called "The Only Speaker of His Tongue", and was originally published in 1985 in his collection Antipodes. It is about a Norwegian man who visits an Aboriginal man who is the last speaker of his language. I will post only the beginning, the rest is for you to discover:

He has already been pointed out to me: a flabby, thickset man of fiftyfive or sixty, very black, working alongside the others and in no way different from them — or so it seems. When they work he swings his pick with the same rhythm. When they pause he squats and rolls a cigarette, running his tongue along the edge of the paper while his eyes, under the stained hat, observe the straight line of the horizon; then he sets it between his lips, cups flame, draws in, and blows out smoke like all the rest.

Wears moleskins looped low under his belly and a flannel vest. Sits at smoko on one heel and sips tea from an enamel mug. Spits, and his spit hisses on stone. Then rises, spits in his palm and takes up the pick. They are digging holes for fencing-posts at the edge of the plain. When called he answers immediately, ‘Here, boss,’ and then, when he has approached, ‘Yes boss, you wanna see me?’ I am presented and he seems amused, as if I were some queer northern bird he had heard about but never till now believed in, a sort of crane perhaps, with my grey frockcoat and legs too spindly in their yellow trousers; an odd, angular fellow with yellow-grey side-whiskers, half spectacles and a cold-sore on his lip. So we stand face to face.

He is, they tell me, the one surviving speaker of his tongue. Half a century back, when he was a boy, the last of his people were massacred. The language, one of hundreds (why make a fuss?) died with them. Only not quite. For all his lifetime this man has spoken it, if only to himself. The words, the great system of sound and silence (for all languages, even the simplest, are a great and complex system) are locked up now in his heavy skull, behind the folds of the black brow (hence my scholarly interest), in the mouth with its stained teeth and fat, rather pink tongue. It is alive still in the man’s silence, a whole alternative universe, since the world as we know it is in the last resort the words through which we imagine and name it; and when he narrows his eyes, and grins and says ‘Yes, boss, you wanna see me?’, it is not breathed out.

I am (you may know my name) a lexicographer. I come to these shores from far off, out of curiosity, a mere tourist, but in my own land I too am the keeper of something: of the great book of words of my tongue. No, not mine, my people’s, which they have made over centuries, up there in our part of the world, and in which, if you have an ear for these things and a nose for the particular fragrance of a landscape, you may glimpse forests, lakes, great snow-peaks that hang over our land like the wings of birds. It is all there in our mouths. In the odd names of our villages, in the pet-names we give to pigs or cows, and to our children too when they are young, Little Bean, Pretty Cowslip; in the nonsense rhymes in which so much simple wisdom is contained (not by accident, the language itself discovers these truths), or in the way, when two consonants catch up a repeated sound, a new thought goes flashing from one side to another of your head.

All this is mystery. It is a mystery of the deep past, but also of now. We recapture on our tongue, when we first grasp the sound and make it, the same word in the mouths of our long dead fathers, whose blood we move in and whose blood still moves in us. Language is that blood. It is the sun taken up where it shares out heat and light to the surface of each thing and made whole, hot, round again. Solen, we say, and the sun stamps once on the plain and pushes up in its great hot body, trailing streams of breath.

O holiest of all holy things! — it is a stooped blond crane that tells you this, with yellow side-whiskers and the grey frockcoat and trousers of his century — since we touch here on beginnings, go deep down under Now to the remotest dark, far back in each ordinary moment of our speaking, even in gossip and the rigmarole of love words and children’s games, into the lives of our fathers, to share with them the single instant of all our seeing and making, all our long history of doing and being. When I think of my tongue being no longer alive in the mouths of men a chill goes over me that is deeper than my own death, since it is the gathered death of all my kind. It is black night descending once and forever on all that world of forests, lakes, snow peaks, great birds’ wings; on little fishing sloops, on foxes nosing their way into a coop, on the piles of logs that make bonfires, and the heels of the young girls leaping over them, on sewing-needles, milk pails, axes, on gingerbread moulds made out of good birchwood, on fiddles, school slates, spinning-tops — my breath catches, my heart jumps. O the holy dread of it! Of having under your tongue the first and last words of all those generations down there in your blood, down there in the earth, for whom these syllables were the magic once for calling the whole of creation to come striding, swaying, singing towards them. I look at this old fellow and my heart stops, I do not know what to say to him.

This year was incidentally the 180th anniversary of the Myall Creek massacre and a special ceremony was held.

I studied years ago a bit of the Gamilaraay language, the traditional language of the Gamilaraay people, to whom the victims belonged. Unfortunately, the last native speakers died decades ago. Some material survives, even audio, recorded by linguists just as it went extinct. Gamilaraay was like most New South Wales languages, in that they died in the early 19th-20th century without leaving much of a trace. They don't have a hundredth of the amount of documentation that currently living Australian languages have. Still, it was a privilege to listen and learn from the tapes. When linguists came back just a few decades later after the death of the last native speaker, there were some Gamilaraay people who could remember words, even some sentences used at home, but not more than that. At that point linguists wrote it off as extinct.

Some people prefer the term 'sleeping' to extinct, as in, it can be woken up. Gamilaraay is indeed undergoing revitalisation, in the sense that it is now taught in some schools, and some of the vocabulary is even being used again, so that if you say yaama in a town in Gamilaraay country, people will say it back to you. It means hi, hello. The people are proud of their language, that's what I found when I was there and I wish its speakers the best of luck.

[nooj]

El Diluví is a Valencian group, who sings in Valencian (variety of Western Catalan, spoken in Valencia). They created a song 'I tu, sols tu' as an homage to the long history of women's emancipation.



What's cool is that they allowed other artists to cover this song in various languages, such as Galician, Basque, Asturian, Aranese. Some of the languages spoken in Spain.

[nooj]

I will translate the version in Basque:

Nahi zenuen hura izango zara,
You will be what you want
hiru aldiz bihurriago.
Three times more rebellious
Hegan doan ukabila,
A fist that flies

ta soilik zuk kontinenteak astindu.
And only you, will shake the continents.

Edozein minetik burujabetua,
Emancipated from any pain
ausarten bizipozarekin atera zinen.
You went out, with the happiness belonging to the brave
Nork daki geroaz,
Who knows the future...
nork daki geroa hobea izango da.
Who knows that the future will be better

Aske sentitu edozein lekutan,
Feeling free in any place
ez utzi inork zu gelditzen.
Don't let anyone stop you
Eta izarra izango zara,
And you will be the star
askatasunera miratzen duen izarra.
The star that guides towards freedom

Apirileko ekaitz gogorra zara,
You will be the fierce April storm
zure etsaientzako oasi garratza.
A bitter oasis for your enemies
Apirileko ekaitz gogorra zara,
You will be the fierce April storm
loreak irekitzen dituen eguzkia.
the Sun that opens the flowers
Zure etsaientzako oasi garratza,
A bitter oasis for your enemies
gauez argitzen duena.
One that shines at night

El Diluví took inspiration for their song from the great Catalan poet, Maria Mercè Marçal, who once said:

A l'atzar agraeixo tres dons: haver nascut dona, de classe baixa i nació oprimida. I el tèrbol atzur de ser tres voltes rebel.

I thank fate for three gifts: for having been born a woman, of humble class and of an oppressed nation. And the murky blue of being three times a rebel.

The last line is a bit confusing, I've read somewhere else that it could be interpreted as 'I thank the murky blue (sky?) for being three times a rebel', but it literally just says 'the murky blue'.

Here is another poem from her:

Som on es trenquen
els vidres. Nua, oberta,
ferida, viva,
la meva sang s'abraça
i es coneix en la teva

We are where the glass
shatters. Naked, open
Wounded, alive
My blood is embraced
And is known in yours

What I like about Marçal is that she is very sensitive to vulnerability and 'weakness', which she converts into strength. She considers it to be her three fold gift that she is a woman, poor and Catalan. In the other poem, she compares self-identity to a bleeding wound, or the intersection between broken glass. She thereby flips over the conventional view that being whole, clothed, impenetrable, free from pain, even impassible (like a Stoic) is strength. A closed body like that, is an uncommunicating body. A body that can bleed, communicates not blood-borne diseases (!), but love

This also reminds me of something that I read of Ludwig Feuerbach, about how the Body that philosophers talk about, is featureless, historyless, sexless, and abstract. Happily philosophers have since moved on and focus heavily on the body as the epicentre of philosophical thought. This was back in the day when I used to learn German.

Wo ausser dem Ich kein Du, kein anderer Mensch ist, ist auch von Moral keine Bede, nur der gesell- schaftliche Mensch ist Mensch. Ich bin Ich nur durch Dich und mit Dir. Ich bin meiner selbst nur bewusst, weil Du meinem Bewusstsein als sichtbares und greifbares Ich, als anderer Mensch gegenüberstehst. Weiss ich, dass ich Mann bin und was der Mann ist, wenn mir kein Weib gegenübersteht? Ich bin meiner selbst bewusst, heisst: ich bin mir vor allem Anderenbewusst , dass ich ein Mann bin, wenn ich nämlich ein Mann bin. Das gleiche, unterschiedslose und geschlechtslose Ich ist nur eine idealistische Chimäre, ein leerer Gedanke. Nur der ins ganze und innerste Wesen dringende Einschnitt ins Fleisch, der Mann und Weib von einander geschnitten, wenn wir einer platonischen Mythe einen Augenblick Zeit und Raum gönnen, begründet oder verwirklicht und versinnlicht erst den Unterschied zwischen Ich und Du, auf dem unser Selbstbewusstsein beruht.

Where there is no You outside the I, no other person, there can also be no talk of morals; only the social man is man. I am I only through You and with You. I am conscious of myself only because You stand facing my consciousness, as a visible and tangible I.

Do I know I am a man and what ‘man’ is, if there is no woman who stands facing me? I am conscious of myself, this means: I am conscious of myself, above all things that I am a man, because I’m – namely this – a man [male].

The same, undifferentiated and sexless I is only an idealistic chimera, an empty thought. Only the incision pressing into the flesh, into the whole and innermost being, which sundered man and woman from each other, if we were to grant a Platonic myth a momentary time and place [Aristophanes’ creation story in the Symposium], first grounds or makes real and makes palpable to sense, the difference between me and you upon which our self-consciousness is based.

[nooj]

This song from Huntza is called Gauerdiko biolinak 'violins of midnight'. It is a very simple song lyrically with repeating loops. Actually it is made up entirely of either poems or bertso-s. Here are the lyrics:

Inork agintzen ez didalako dut maite maite dudana. Ta zure irria, zure irria ere, inork agintzen ez didalako dut maite.
Because no one has told me to, I love what I love. Your smile, your smile too, I love, because no one has told me to.

Gauerdiko biolinak sutan, bi mutxurdin leihoetan sutan!
Violins of midnight on fire, two spinsters at the windows, on fire!

The first loop is derived from a poem by Joseba Sarrionandia, who I have already talked about:

Inork agintzen ez didalako
Because no one has told me to
dut maite
I love
maite dudana.
What I love
Inork agintzen ez didalako
Because no one has told me to
ditut basamortua eta izarlokak maite.
I love the desert and the shooting stars.
Itsasontzi noragabeak, gauerdiko biolinak
Boats without aim, violins of midnight
ilunabarren margoa, xorino hezurttoen higidura,
The colour of the sunset, the movement of the little bones of birdies
sagarrondoetan eskegiriko bihotz horiak,
The yellow cores hanging from the apple trees
tristura handiegia zaien neskatxak
The girls for whom the sadness is too great to bear
eta zure irria, zure irria ere
And your smile, your smile too
inork agintzen ez dudalako
Because no one has told me to
dut maite.
I love

The second part of the song derives from a bertso made by Telesforo Monzón, an important Basque nationalist leader, called Haize hegoa 'the South Wind'.

Haize hegoa
gau epela
ilargiaren argi
mutxurdinak leihoetan
teiatuan katu bi
bide ertzean zenbait kanta
gau erdiz arnoari
Hargaineko sorgin zaharrak
keinuka ilargiari.

The South Wind
Warm night
The light of the moon
Two spinsters at the windows
Two cats on the roof
Songs at the edge of the path
Sung to wine, at midnight
Old witches from Hargain
Winking at the moon

Mikel Laboa, that titan of Basque music, put this bertso into music. In homage to the man after he passed away, they created a mural for him in the town of San Andres:

[nooj]

I want to talk about one of our Australian languages, Murrinh Patha. First, here is a song called Yederr, made by the group Wakal Bengkunh based in the town of Wadeye, for you to get a feel of the language and the lands where it is spoken. The song name Yederr refers to the geographical area north of Wadeye. The song is about the landmarks, the totemic connections between the people and the land - or so I hear. I don't speak Murrinh Patha.



Wadeye is a small town of approximately 2500 people, the majority of whom are Aboriginal, and what's more, most people come from the land in the sense that they belong to the traditional clans of the area. This is not always the case in Australia, as Europeans moved or restricted the movement of Aboriginal people, keeping people from their traditional lands or sending them to missions, cattle stations etc far away from where they used to live.

As you see in the video, Wadeye is near the coast and you can see the mangroves, a rich source of food and shelter. Many Australians, let alone foreigners, have the mistaken impression that 'all Aboriginal people live in the desert'. North Australia is a particularly rich, often green, very wet place. In-land you will have swamps, river plains etc. There are numerous Aboriginal peoples who make their living from the sea, hunting sea turtles, dugongs, fish, crabs etc.



Wadeye is extremely difficult to access, which probably accounts for why there are so few white people there. During the wet season (half of the year), the roads are impenetrable to vehicles and the town is virtually cut off, and in the other half, the roads are in a terrible state anyway. The majority of the population is polyglot, as traditional Aboriginal society used to be, but Murrinh Patha must be the lingua franca, and you CANNOT expect most people to speak English.

Murrinh Patha is spoken by about two thousand five hundred to three thousand people, and this makes it one of the healthiest Australian languages. It is one of the very few where children still learn the language. In fact, Murrinh Patha probably has never had as many speakers as it does today.

Murrinh Patha is a non-Pama-Nyungan language, that is to say, it does not belong to the massive language family that dominates most of mainland Australia. Pama-Nyungan is the equivalent if you like of the Indo-European family. There are 28 language families spoken in Australia, of which PN is one. Compare to the 6 or 8 or so language families spoken in all of Europe.

The bulk of that linguistic diversity is found in northern Australia, where we presume the first Australians arrived via landbridges when the sea level was much lower, many tens of thousands of years ago. Northern Australia is extremely linguistically diverse, probably for a similar reason as to why the highest diversity of English dialects is in England, because English has been there the longest, and time + change = fragmentation.

To be simplistic about it, Australian languages can be divided into two kinds of typologies, head marking or dependent marking. Languages in north Australia are head-marking. That is to say, they are like Basque in that they mark grammatical relations through verbal morphology. The verb carries the weight, if you will. But they take the concept to a much more extreme level than Basque, they are polysynthetic languages like many of those in North America. Murrinh Patha is extremely polysynthetic, capable of creating verbs that are the equivalent of entire sentences in a language like English. Dependent marking languages on the other hand, use case morphology instead to do the same job, i.e. suffixes, and the concept will be familiar to speakers of Finnish or Hungarian.

I often wonder why I go to other countries, when I love Australia. Some of the most interesting languages in the world are spoken right here. I should be learning them. It is full of interesting cultures and stories. The nature is unbelievable, the flora and fauna are mindblowing. In Europe you can't drive for days and not see anyone or any sign of human habitation. I love the faded green of eucalyptus, the peeling of gum trees, the smell of bushfire, the call of a seemingly infinite variety of birds, the crashing of waves, the thunderstorm on the horizon, the sense of deep history. Australia is in a sense 'young', we don't have any building that is as old as European ones, and European tourists keep telling me so. But I have had more of a thrill running down my back from stumbling onto a rock painting that is thousands of years old in a hidden rock shelter than any cathedral I've seen in Europe.

Australia has been my home for 20 years, and yet I know very little about it really. Each time I go overseas, I come back loving and desiring to know my country even more. I don't mean the government or its dark history. And I am no nationalist. Just my relation to this land and its people keeps bringing me back. I'd like to die here.

Here is a picture of fox footprints (we have lots of invasive pest animals). We were out bird watching on the dunes in the morning. You can see other tracks as well: lizards, snakes, birds, insects. The best time to watch them is at night when it is much cooler.



Here is a wild dog (maybe a dingo?) sniffing around a kangaroo carcass. We were studying scavenger interactions in desert environments:

[nooj]

This is the appropriate time to talk about my favourite Australian movie. Maybe my favourite movie full stop. Here is the opening introduction. It is worth it to watch it in full screen, HD:



It is called Ten Canoes, by Rolf de Heer. Set in a timeless past. Aside from the narrator, David Gulpilil who speaks in English, the entire movie is in Yolŋu languages, and set in what is now known as Arnhem Land, in North-Eastern Australia. Arnhem Land was named after a Dutch ship, itself named after the Dutch city Arnhem. Gulpilil himself is a Yolŋu man, and it is said that he speaks 14 languages. I would not be surprised, multilingualism is rampant in Arnhem Land, as you can hear for yourself in the movie from the actors, each of whom speak in their language.



Yolŋu languages, which are somewhat mutually comprehensible, are spoken in total by about 5000 speakers. There are about 16,000 people living in Arnhem Land today. It is a sparsely populated, utterly beautiful area. As you can see, the region is big enough to comfortably swallow a few European nations.

You can hear in the movie at least Dhuwal/Djambarrpuyŋu, lingua franca in the Ramingining and Milingimbi region, as well as the Djinang language, as well as Gumatj.

[nooj]

Maria del Mar Bonet is one of Mallorca's most famous singers. In Cançons de Festa (1976), she sings traditional, popular songs.



Here is the song Blancaflor, which I will split up into parts for better reading. It is about a woman called Blancaflor, literally 'White Flower'. I add notes, mostly to point out Mallorcan forms.

Al mirador del castell,
Blancaflor està asseguda.
Amb una pinteta d'or
sos cabeis pentina i nua.
Gira els uis devers el cel,
no veu estrella ninguna.
Els gira devers la mar,
i veu traspuntar a lluna.
Les veles veu arribar
d'una nau qui n'és venguda.

On top of the watchtower of the castle
Blancaflor is seated
With a golden comb
She combs and knots her hair
She lifts her eyes to the sky
She sees no stars
She turns them to the sea
And she sees the Moon peek out
She sees the sails arrive
Of a ship that has come from it (the Moon)

Ulls and cabells -> uis and cabeis in Mallorcan. /ʎ/ -> /j/ in Mallorca.
La mar - in Mallorcan, the sea is consistently feminine.
Sos - poetic form (normally seus). By analogy with meus, teus, se -> sos. Note that in the poem, it is NOT els sos cabeis, which is how possession normally works in Catalan, but () sos cabeis.

Mira devers el camí
i veu molta gent que hi puja.
Veu venir un cavaller
qui va a cavall d'una mula.
Sella i brilla ne són d'or
i també les ferredures.
Un gran acompanyament
el senyor darrere duia,
i, de tant lluny com la veu,
el cavaller la saluda.

She looks towards the path
And sees there many people who are going up it
She sees a knight coming
Riding a mule
Saddle and bridle, made of gold
And the horseshoes as well.
A great following,
The lord brought with him
When he sees her from so far away
The knight greets her.

-Cavaller, bon cavaller,
si veniu de part de França
haureu vist el meu senyor,
que Déu guardi de desgràcia.
-L'he vist i l'he conegut
i amb ell tenc grossa amistança.
Som dinat, ans de venir,
moltes voltes a sa taula.
Ara ja deu ser casat:
el Rei li donà una infanta.

"Knight, good knight
If you come from France
You must have seen my lord
May God keep him from misadventure"
"I have seen him and I have gotten to know him
And with him, I keep a great friendship.
I have dined, before coming
Many times at his table
By now he must be wed
The Lord gave him a baby girl"

Veniu - the pronoun used between the knight and the lady is vós, a polite pronoun that is not very used nowadays. The conjugation used is the same as for vosaltres (2nd person plural).
Tenc - the Mallorcan form, elsewhere you will find tinc.
Som dinat - Mallorcan form. Among older speakers in Mallorca and in old texts, the auxiliary ésser is used with verbs of motions (som arribat! 'I have come!') or here, anomalously, with dinar. Younger speakers in Mallorca use haver consistently for all verbs, so they would say 'he dinat'.
Ans - poetic form of abans, although some dialects in the very south of Valencia use this regularly.

-Benhaja ell qui la mantén!
Malhaja qui la hi ha dada!
Fa set anys que jo l'esper,
com a dona ben casada.
Set altres l'esperaré
com una viudeta honrada.
Si dins aquest temps no ve,
seré monja consagrada.
Me tancaré en el convent,
el convent de Santa Clara.

Blessed be he who keeps her (the baby girl)
Cursed be the woman who has given her to him
I have been waiting for seven years
As a well married lady
Seven other years I will wait for him
As an honoured little widow.
If in that time he does not come
I will become a consecrated nun
I will shut myself up in the convent
The convent of Santa Clara.

Benhaja/malhaja - fossilised forms of the imperative 3rd person singular of haver.
Esper - Balearic form. In the Baleares, the final vowel of the first person singular conjugation systematically disappears.

-Senyora, jo fos de vós,
no voldria estar tancada.
Pot venir vostron marit
a l'hora més impensada.
Què faríeu, dama, vós,
si davant el vésseu ara?
-Faria els rosers florir
i les poncelles badar-se.
Senyora, idò, ja poreu,
que davant el teniu ara.
Se daren tant fort abraç que d'alegria ploraven.
Se giren ençà i enllà;
els rosers aponcellaven.

"My lady, if I were you
I would not wish to be shut up.
Your husband might come
At the most unexpected hour.
What would you do, my lady
If before you, you were to see him now?"
"I would make the rose bushes bloom
And the buds open"
"My lady, then you can do it now
Because before you, you have him now"
They hugged each other so tightly that they wept with happiness
They turn this way and that way, around them
The rose bushes were blooming

Vostron - in other Catalan dialects, vostre. In the Balearic islands, vostro. Vostron is another form, by analogy to mon, ton, son etc.
Vésseu - veiéssiu
Idò - the classic Mallorcan discourse marker, 'so'. The equivalent of doncs.
Poreu - Mallorcan form of podeu. The change from /d/ to /r/ is easy to understand, both sounds have the same point of articulation (alveolar). In fact, this sound change happens in a lot of languages, and is called rhotacism. It happens in other places as well in Mallorca, such as posar -> podar. So for example, he puts in Catalonia would be said 'posa' but in Mallorca, it is often said 'poda'.
Se - in the Balearic islands, the strong versions of the clitic pronouns are usually used. So instead of em dic (my name is), they say me dic, instead of es pot fer (it can be done), se pot fer.