Talk:Kaurna language

What the...

Can someone please translate the following lead sentence:

"Kaurna" is the Norman Tindale "mapped", Adelaide University UNESCO award winning Linguist Dr Robert (Rob) Amery "managed" Creole language of the Kaurna people, a self identifying, indigenous ethnic group, in South Australia.

There's so many convoluted nouns, by the time I'd gotten halfway through, I'd lost track of where I'd been. LordVetinari (talk) 07:14, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

I agree, it's a crazy lead. Akerbeltz (talk) 10:53, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

That's much better. Thank you. LordVetinari (talk) 11:04, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

Six months later and the hundred word sentences with barely a verb in sight are back, and interspersed with the edits of other users as well as the culprit's. I know this is kind of frowned upon, but I'm just going to revert the article back to the last comprehensible version, which Akerbeltz wrote on 20 April 2011.--Yeti Hunter (talk) 10:35, 3 October 2011 (UTC)

Some info from a Kaurna Textbook: Copyright & Ambiguities

Hey all. I've got a copy of Kulurdu Marni Ngathaitya! Sounds Good to Me! by KWP, which is for learning Kaurna. I was planning to use knowledge gained from that to update this barebones article but a couple of things popped out at me:

• The copyright page claims the Kaurna language is copyright property of the Kaurna people. AFAIK, copyright language has not been tested well in courts, and furthermore, trademarking words of a language has precedent against it in US (see Loglan/Lojban) and Polish/EU (see here) courts, and systems (e.g. grammar and syntax in this context) to my knowledge can't get IP protections, just their trademarks. And while this is purely my own feelings, it does seem to have some nasty implications, tying copyright of essentially public domain concepts like languages to ethnicities. So, anyone know if this statement has any value or relevance to the greater public, esp. Wikipedia?
• This is a learner's textbook rather than a linguist-oriented detailed grammar, so some details are a tad vague - for example, I'm still looking to see how plurals and case markers interact (I've found a example on pg37 now at least), and the phonology of the language doesn't use IPA. I'm gonna try and interpret it as conservatively as possible to avoid personal research, but any ideas about this would be great.

Cheers all. Ceigered (talk) 12:40, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

(EDIT: OK, I've fixed up the Introduction paragraph. Time to add some phonology and grammar Ceigered (talk) 13:27, 8 November 2014 (UTC))Actually, heck, I'm gonna try cleaning up other parts of the article too. The first sentence of the article made me raise an eyebrow, just coz of the way it's been worded and its placement in the article. Ceigered (talk) 12:47, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

editorial text removed from article

I have removed the following from the article to this page. It sounds like someone is upset that the written spelling has been changed following the rediscovery of 1840s documents that were in German rather than English.

[The next few sentences express a criticism of KWP which departs from the objectivity sought by Wikipedia.] --> Today all the old phonetic spellings of the old language recorded by settlers and the missionaries from the mouths of the old people have been changed by the small group of KWP. Today tartanyangga is the new spelling and the new spelling has changed the sound and tongue shape and therefore the cultural meaning has also been changed as linguistics is based upon a scientific methodology which does not integrate the sacred meaning of a land birthed language. <---

I am not a linguist or Kaurna, so will probably not try to sort out whether the changed spelling actually represents a change in sound, or simply a better way of transcribing a spoken-only language. There is also the fact that dialect varied across the range of Kaurna people, so pronunciation could have been different for the same words too. --Scott Davis ^Talk 11:11, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

For what it's worth there is section on this topic (the orthography) in KWP's Kaurna textbook (I can't find where I put the book though, it's in a box somewhere due to moving around). They had to basically guesstimate the pronunciation of some words here and there because of the use of things like ⟨e⟩ and ⟨o⟩ despite the language appearing to have a phonemic 3 vowel system like most other Pama-Nyungan languages in the area. But yeah, certainly no evidence of any them altering the evolutionary course of the language's phonology or whatever that paragraph was trying to express. Ceigered (talk) 08:36, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

Kɑwɑɖɳa: (meaning "north") is the correct form

And more precisely, the short "a" stands for a targeted /ɑ/, which sounds "muffled" or "reduced" to most European ears, so it was so easy to represent the word as "Kaurna". Everybody can understand that a language so poorly attested cannot be known unless vaguely, but even much harder is for English people to pronounce an aboriginal language. Even if there is a political volition to show that the language is resurrected, an English spoken area is not the best place for it; "the whole world learns English, and now you are telling me to learn another language, let alone a dead one, and that of the aboriginals who know nothing but lying under the trees and sipping beers?". Good try, anyway, this Wikipedia article itself is sufficient proof that they are doing an earnest work for the show. By the way, if you want to reconstruct a dead language, try to do it with accuracy. The name "Tandanya", for example, recorded from the mouth of Ivaritji as "Dundagunya", with linguistic commonsense is understood to be /t̪ɑɳɖa: ʔɑɲa:/ (the short "a", being /ɑ/). (Since we know that /t̪ɑɳɖa:/ is the male red kangaroo (and the ancestral hero of that name) and /ʔɑɲa:/ means "place"). The glottal stop should be added to the phonology of Kɑwɑɖɳa:. In general, the English transcriptions are misleading; better if you use a Devanaagari transcription for the Australian aboriginal. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 46.103.204.23 (talk) 05:49, 9 June 2016 (UTC)