Sub sections:
Lakes, Karus, Creeks
Language, water and ethnogeography in a dry land
Helen Bromhead
School of Language Studies, ANU, Canberra
Monday 10th November
12 noon–1pm
Seminar Room 2 (Rm 31), Psychology Building SO6
The dry continent of Australia is most often mapped in terms of lakes, rivers, deserts and creeks, English words brought from the far-off and geographically very different British Isles (Arthur 2003, Robin 2007). However, categories derived from English language classifications like mountain and stream are not universal but rather are culture and language specific. Features which many people label with Australian English landscape terms like river or hill in fact have older names in the indigenous languages of Australia (or even in Aboriginal English). These indigenous terms can reveal conceptions of land different from the Australian English one. Many geographers recognize that simply using English landscape terms will not suffice in their work, and in recent years some geographers have sought the help of linguists in the problem of finding terms which can be used across the world (Burenhult & Levinson eds. 2008, Mark & Turk 2003, 2004, 2007). I propose that we can begin to access these language-specific geographic concepts through unravelling the meanings of words such as river and hill using the NSM (Natural Semantic Metalanguage) method of semantic explanation. In this seminar I will talk about some landscape terms both in English (particularly in Australian English) and in the Australian Indigenous language Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara and I will present explanations of their meanings. I will concentrate on terms for places where there is water, and also, in Australia, often where there is not water – words like the (Australian) English creek and lake and the Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara karu (‘creekline’) and tjukula (‘rockhole’) – and I will explore how the meanings of these terms reveal different worldviews.