Review of Innamincka talk: A grammar of the Innamincka dialect of Yandruwandha with notes on other dialects. and Innamincka words: Yandruwandha dictionary and stories.
posted November 14th, 2008
Innamincka words: Yandruwandha dictionary and stories. By Gavan Breen. (Pacific linguistics 559.)
Reviewed by Harald Hammarström,
The distinguished Australian salvage linguist Gavan Breen has completed a fine two-volume set on the Innamincka dialect of Yandruwandha: one grammar volume for the typologist/Australian linguist and one ‘less technical’ dictionary (with texts) intended to be of interest also for the descendant community.
Most of the metadata on the language and its study is in the grammar volume. Yandruwandha was spoken in the north-east corner of
As in most grammars, the descriptive data starts off with the phoneme inventory. The phonology section as a whole is surprisingly detailed, containing information such as (morpho)phonological rules, sentence intonation, and a phoneme frequency chart. Understandably, given the circumstances of data availability, there are a number of uncertainties on minor matters. However, and this is something I especially like about this grammar, B always shows on what basis something is affirmed, doubted, or cannot be known.
The next chapter, somewhat misplaced, discusses word order and phrase order. In this language it is grammatical to permute the order of phrases and words quite freely, and also to split phrases. But, at least from the corpus of recorded sentences, there are some clear statistical tendencies, such as not to split phrases, SOV/AOV word order, and initial question-word placement.
The following chapter discusses how the phonological word and grammatical word may be defined in Innamincka Yandruwandha. Most grammars, including modern ones, fail to treat this question, as famously lamented by R. M. W. Dixon and Alexandra Aikhenvald in their editors’ introduction to Word: A cross-linguistic typology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 1–41).
Information on word classes, pronoun inflection, simple sentences, noun inflection, and noun-stem formation follow with few surprises. The verb has a lot of suffixal inflection, which is the topic of another chapter. There is no indication that the description is incomplete (again, given the limits of data availability), except for an occasional suffix of unknown function. The verb can be further modified with bound markers indicating aspect, direction of motion, emphasis, and more, inserted between the root and inflection. In fact, verb stems can incorporate adverb and noun roots, another verb, and even an inflected noun, and then take the bound marker and an inflectional suffix. Further chapters cover complex clauses, particles, conjunctions, interjections, and clitics.
The grammar is entirely functional, described in plain English with no trees, acronyms, or formulae whatsoever.
There is not as much to say about the companion dictionary volume. The dictionary is Innamincka to English (beginning at D since no word begins with A, B, or C) with an English finder list. It contains separate sections on place names, naming of new concepts, and kinship terms. Also, there is a very useful alphabetical list of suffixes. There is not much text material, but all of it is diligently annotated with interlinear translation.
We are thankful to B for filling this gap in documentation. As it is much more complete than a sketch grammar or other salvage studies, it will certainly be valuable to Australianists and typologists alike (and hopefully of interest to the descendant community).
