CARL STREHLOW’S 1909 COMPARATIVE HERITAGE DICTIONARY AN ARANDA, GERMAN, LORITJA AND DIERI TO ENGLISH DICTIONARY WITH INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS CARL STREHLOW’S 1909 COMPARATIVE HERITAGE DICTIONARY AN ARANDA, GERMAN, LORITJA AND DIERI TO ENGLISH DICTIONARY WITH INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS Transcribed and translated from the German by Anna Kenny Translated from Aranda and Loritja to English by the Inkamala families and members of the Western Aranda community MONOGRAPHS IN ANTHROPOLOGY SERIES Published by ANU Press The Australian National University Acton ACT 2601, Australia Email: [email protected] Available to download for free at press.anu.edu.au ISBN (print): 9781760462062 ISBN (online): 9781760462079 WorldCat (print): 1047957658 WorldCat (online): 1047957556 DOI: 10.22459/CSCHD.08.2018 This title is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). The full licence terms are available at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode Cover design and layout by ANU Press This edition © 2018 ANU Press CENTRAL LAND COUNCIL Contents Disclaimer . vii Abbreviations . ix Foreword . xi Nicolas Peterson Preface and acknowledgements . .. xiii Contributors . xix 1 . A heritage dictionary . .. 1 Anna Kenny 2 . Working on the dictionary . 15 Rhonda Inkamala 3 . Rella nunaka inguia—our old people . 23 Mark Inkamala 4 . The unpublished manuscript . 35 Anna Kenny 5 . Assessing Carl Strehlow’s dictionary as linguistic description: Present value and future potential . 63 John Henderson 6 . The Mission Orthography in Carl Strehlow’s dictionary . 101 David Moore References . 131 Carl Strehlow’s 1909 Comparative Heritage Dictionary 141 Select index . 371 Disclaimer This dictionary is a listing of words that the old people of the former Hermannsburg mission put down on paper at the turn of the twentieth century. For cultural reasons, the descendants of these old Aranda and Loritja [Luritja] people have taken out culturally sensitive words so that any Aboriginal people can read it. The handwritten manuscript of this dictionary is held at the Strehlow Research Centre in Alice Springs. Researchers who would like to access it for research purposes can make an application to the Strehlow Research Centre. While every effort has been made to transcribe the handwritten dictionary manuscript accurately, some errors may have occurred, because in some instances the handwriting in German Kurrentschrift and in Stolze stenography is not clear enough to be completely certain about the transcription. In these instances, the note [unclear] has been added. Another obstacle to the editing of this resource was Carl Strehlow’s spelling, because it did not always provide an accurate pronunciation and made some words unrecognisable. Thus, there is a small possibility that a very few sensitive terms have been included by accident. vii Abbreviations CS Carl Strehlow FRM Finke River Mission IAD Institute for Aboriginal Development IPA International Phonetic Alphabet LAA Lutheran Archives in Adelaide SRC Strehlow Research Centre ix Foreword Nicolas Peterson An excellent heritage dictionary is a cultural foundation stone for any people. This translation of Lutheran missionary Carl Strehlow’s previously unpublished comparative Aranda–Luritja dictionary from German into English is one such dictionary. Building on the work of A.H. Kempe, his predecessor at the Hermannsburg mission, Carl Strehlow had over 7,600 entries at the time of his death in 1922, making it by far the largest dictionary for any Aboriginal language up until the present. It was a comparative dictionary because he wanted to show that Aranda and Luritja were two distinct languages, although the people were neighbours. The enormously painstaking work of transcribing the original manuscript handwritten in four languages, Aranda, Luritja, German and some Dieri, as well as sections in an old form of German shorthand, has been carried out by Dr Anna Kenny. As a native German speaker, she has also translated Carl Strehlow’s German glosses into English, checking many of the translations in close collaboration with people whose mother tongue is Aranda and/or Luritja, in particular Rhonda Inkamala and her parents the late Davie Inkamala and Trudy Inkamala. To introduce the dictionary, Anna Kenny has included six preliminary chapters. She provides an introductory background to the dictionary, and a separate detailed account of the manuscript’s complex history. Rhonda Inkamala writes about working on the dictionary and Mark Inkamala provides short biographical sketches of the men who helped Carl Strehlow with learning the language and about Aranda culture. Two further chapters by Dr John Henderson and David Moore, both linguists, spell out in an accessible way many of the complexities involved in any dictionary making, as illustrated by this dictionary. John Henderson shows what important grammatical and other information can be provided by xi CARL STREHLOW’S 1909 ComparatiVE Heritage Dictionary analysing the organisation of the dictionary, the placement of words, and the many choices that Carl Strehlow made in compiling it, while David Moore sets out the fascinating challenges involved in settling on an orthography to represent the sounds in the Aranda language. Dictionaries are consulted, not read. One reason for consulting this dictionary is as a baseline against which language and linguistic change can be explored. Because it is available electronically, as well as in hard copy, it opens the way to easy comparison with present day Aranda and Luritja as well as other kinds of work. An ideal heritage dictionary, such as the Oxford English Dictionary, is one based on historical principles— that is, besides showing the spelling and meaning of words, it provides their history or biography. Uniquely, this dictionary opens the way for such a historical Aranda–Luritja dictionary. Carl Strehlow collected many and lengthy texts, which when combined with those collected by his son, T.G.H. Strehlow, make it possible for a future Aranda and/or Luritja scholar to quarry this corpus and expand this heritage dictionary to provide exemplary sentences that illustrate usage at known periods in time. It may be many years before this happens but I have no doubt it will. When this dictionary is added to the seven volumes of Carl Strehlow’s ethnography, the work of Sir Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen, of T.G.H. Strehlow, of Olive Pink, of Diane Austin-Broos, of John Morton, and other work by Anna Kenny, not to mention the fund of historical information from the mission post-1877, Aranda people have a uniquely rich written record of aspects of their cultural heritage for future generations. xii Preface and acknowledgements I came to the idea of transcribing, translating and publishing Carl Strehlow’s handwritten Aranda, Loritja [Luritja], German and Dieri dictionary manuscript into English during my PhD research. But having started on what I thought was a straightforward task I realised that some of my translations from German to English required the original Aranda and Loritja to German translation to be checked by Aranda and Luritja speakers and so I approached members of the Aranda/Luritja community to work at points where there appeared to be some doubt about the original translation into German. Without the enthusiastic support of Western Aranda people, the publication of this unique document would not have been possible. I thank the members of the Inkamala, Malbunka, Rontji, Katakarinja, Williams, Kenny, Lechleitner, Kantawarra, Ratara, Armstrong, Raggett, Ebatarinja, Pareroultja, Impu, Rubuntja, Renkeraka, Wheeler, Ungwanaka, Mack, McCormack, Pepperill, Kentilja, Moketarintja and Abbott families for their involvement in this project over the years. Davie Inkamala (1 January 1935 – 11 September 2013) was one of the main contributors to the discussion about my translations of the German glosses into English. He, his wife Trudi Inkamala and his daughters Rhonda and Jennifer Inkamala, who live at Kwale Kwale on the Iwupataka Land Trust in central Australia, have always believed that it is of paramount importance for Aranda and Luritja people to maintain their languages, and to keep their cultures strong, and have dedicated much of their time to doing so. xiii CARL STREHLOW’S 1909 ComparatiVE Heritage Dictionary Figure 1: Davie Inkamala, Trudy Inkamala, Rhonda Inkamala and Anna Kenny at Kwale Kwale, 2013. Source: Shane Mulcahy . The research supporting the translation of this dictionary and checking it with Aranda and Luritja speakers has been funded by Australian Research Council Linkage grant (LP110200803) ‘Rescuing Carl Strehlow’s Indigenous cultural heritage legacy: The neglected German tradition of Arandic ethnography’. This grant was a collaborative project between the Central Land Council and the Strehlow Research Centre, both in Alice Springs, and the providers of generous industry partner funding, the University of Western Australia and The Australian National University. The project had several aims. The principal aim was to transcribe, translate and publish the 7,600 word Aranda and Luritja dictionary compiled between 1894 and 1922 by Lutheran missionary Carl Strehlow at Hermannsburg Mission west of Alice Springs. The grant provided a postdoctoral fellowship for me to work on transcribing and translating the 7,600-word dictionary from the original handwritten manuscript, which is in three Aboriginal languages, Aranda, Luritja and Dieri, as well as German, of which