The Djiringanj , also spelt Dyirringañ , are an Aboriginal Australian people of the southern coast of New South Wales . They are one of a larger group, known as the Yuin people, who all speak or spoke dialects of the Yuin–Kuric group of languages .
20-536: Robert M. W. Dixon classifies the Djiringanj language as distinct from both Thaua and Dhurga . They are all Yuin–Kuric languages. The Djiringanj's tribal lands encompassed roughly 1,200 square miles (3,100 km) southwards along the coast from Cape Dromedary to beyond Bega . Their inland extension ran up to the scarp of the Great Dividing Range east of Nimmitabel . They were wedged between
40-517: A Language and Culture Research Centre within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at JCU, Cairns, in 2011. Currently, Aikhenvald is director and Dixon deputy director of the centre. (The list below is incomplete. ) References: During the 1960s, Dixon published two science-fiction short stories under the name of Simon Tully, and in the 1980s two detective novels under the name of Hosanna Brown. Mbabaram language Mbabaram (Barbaram)
60-649: A comprehensive grammar of Boumaa Fijian , a Polynesian language (1988), and Jarawara , an Arawá language from southern Amazonia (2004), for which he received the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award from the Linguistic Society of America. Dixon's work in historical linguistics has been highly influential. Based on a careful historical comparative analysis, Dixon questions the concept of Pama–Nyungan languages, for which he argues sufficient evidence has never been provided. He also proposes
80-659: A new "punctuated equilibrium" model, based on the theory of the same name in evolutionary biology, which is more appropriate for numerous language regions, including the Australian languages. Dixon puts forth his theory in The Rise and Fall of Languages , refined in his monograph Australian Languages: their nature and development (2002). Dixon is the author of a number of other books, including Australian Languages: Their Nature and Development and Ergativity . His monumental three-volume work Basic Linguistic Theory (2010–2012)
100-541: A question of efficiency and value of different languages. His editorial work includes four volumes of Handbook of Australian Languages (with Barry Blake ), a special issue of Lingua on ergativity, and, jointly with Alexandra Aikhenvald, numerous volumes on linguistic typology in the series Explorations in Linguistic Typology , the fundamental The Amazonian languages (1999), and The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Typology (2017). His most recent book
120-630: A specially built boat and handmade traditional net, young men from the community will target species like flathead , bream , and mullet , and hand over their catch to local elders . They see it as a way of helping people who live below the poverty line , and suffer from poor nutrition, particularly lack of iodine , and diseases such as heart disease and diabetes brought on partly by poor nutrition. Source: Tindale 1974 , p. 193 Robert M. W. Dixon Robert Malcolm Ward "Bob" Dixon (born 25 January 1939, in Gloucester , England )
140-475: Is The Unmasking of English Dictionaries (2018), which offers a concise history of English dictionaries unmasking their drawbacks, and suggests a new innovative way of dictionary making. His "We used to eat people", Revelations of a Fiji islands traditional village (2018) offers a vivid portrayal of his fieldwork in Fiji in the late 1980s. In 1996, Dixon and another linguist, Alexandra Aikhenvald , established
160-527: Is a Professor of Linguistics in the College of Arts, Society, and Education and The Cairns Institute, James Cook University , Queensland . He is also Deputy Director of The Language and Culture Research Centre at JCU. Doctor of Letters (DLitt, ANU, 1991), he was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters Honoris Causa by JCU in 2018. Fellow of British Academy ; Fellow of the Australian Academy of
180-612: Is an extinct Australian Aboriginal language of north Queensland . It was the traditional language of the Mbabaram people . Recordings are held in the Audiovisual Archive of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies . 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
200-556: Is known of the language is from Dixon's field research with speaker Albert Bennett. Until R. M. W. Dixon 's work on the language, "Barbaram" (as it was then known) was thought to be too different from other languages to be part of the Pama–Nyungan language family. Dixon revealed it to have descended from a more typical form, that was obscured by subsequent changes. Dixon (2002) himself, however, still regards genetic relationships between Mbabaram and other languages as unproven. Mbabaram
220-627: The Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in north-east Queensland, working on several of the Aboriginal languages of Australia , but taking a particular interest in Dyirbal . Dixon has written on many areas of linguistic theory and fieldwork, being particularly noted for his work on the languages of Australia and the Arawá languages of Brazil. He has published grammars of Dyirbal , Yidiɲ , Warrgamay , Nyawaygi , and Mbabaram . He published
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#1732794134379240-654: The Walbanga to their north and the Thaua to their south, while their western limits touched those of the Ngarigo . In early 2020, men from the Bermagui Wallaga Lake Djiringanj men's group were able to resume their traditional practice of fish with nets on Wallaga Lake for the first time in decades. After obtaining a special cultural fishing permit, that allows them to fish once a week using
260-611: The Humanities , and Honorary member of the Linguistic Society of America , he is one of three living linguists to be specifically mentioned in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics by Peter Matthews (2014). Dixon was born in Gloucester , in the west of England , in 1939 and as a child lived at Stroud and later at Bramcote near Nottingham , where his father became principal of
280-643: The People's College of Further Education. He was educated at Nottingham High School and then at the University of Oxford , where he took his first degree in mathematics in 1960, and finally at the University of Edinburgh , where he was a Research Fellow in Statistical Linguistics in the English department from July 1961 to September 1963. After that until September 1964 he did field work for
300-892: The Research Centre for Linguistic Typology at the Australian National University in Canberra . On 1 January 2000, the centre moved to La Trobe University in Melbourne . Both Dixon (the director of the centre) and Aikhenvald (its associate director) resigned their positions in May 2008. In early 2009, Aikhenvald and Dixon established the Language and Culture Research Group (LCRG) at the Cairns campus of James Cook University . This has been transformed into
320-525: 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 , 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 ). The similarity is a complete coincidence:
340-407: 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. 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: The first consonant of each word
360-709: Was published by the Oxford University Press. His further work on Australian languages was published in Edible gender, mother-in-law style, and other grammatical wonders: Studies in Dyirbal, Yidiñ and Warrgamay , 2015. His further influential monographs include work on English grammar, especially A new approach to English grammar (1991, revised edition 2005), and Making New Words: Morphological Derivation in English (2014). His recent monograph Are Some Languages Better than Others (2016, paperback 2018) poses
380-533: 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 Agwamin , Djangun ( Kuku-Yalanji ), Muluridji ( Kuku-Yalanji ), Djabugay , Yidiny , Ngadjan ( Dyirbal ), Mamu ( Dyirbal ), Jirrbal ( Dyirbal ), Girramay ( Dyirbal ), and Warungu . While these were often mutually intelligible , to varying degrees, with
400-417: Was then dropped, leaving the distribution of /ɔ ɛ ɨ/ unpredictable. 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
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