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The name Gamilaraay consists of two parts: gamil
meaning 'no' and araay meaning 'having', that is
'the people who have gamil for no'. This method of
naming people after their word for 'no' is widespread
throughout New South Wales and Victoria; for example, the
western neighbours of the Gamilaraay, the Yuwaalaraay, say
waal for 'no'.
Gamilaraay is a rich language with a vocabulary of many
thousands of words and quite a complicated grammar.
However, this Web dictionary does not contain
all the words of the language. Due to the impact of
colonisation in northern New South Wales, Gamilaraay
stopped being used daily in the first half of this century, and
as a result much knoweldge has been lost.
But the dictionary does bring together much of the material
collected by researchers and
others over the past forty years. Some entries have been
'reconstituted' from old sources, by working out what sounds were
intended by the (often inconsistent) written spellings. These
words, whose proper pronunciation remains uncertain, are marked
'*recon' in the dictionary.
Gamilaraay was spoken in several dialect forms, and different
words were used in various places. For example, people
living to the north on the Upper Barwon around Collarenebri
and Boggabilla used waabi for 'mother-in-law',
while those in the south on the Namoi around Narrabri and
Coonabarabran used buyal.
A Gamilaraay word starts each dictionary entry. It is bold, on
the left margin.
Some words contain a hyphen (-), indicating where the
word can be broken into parts. VERBS (words that
have to do with doing and being) always have an ending
(suffix) following a hyphen. There are four endings you find
on verbs: -li, -y, -gi, and
-rri. These are the endings that indicate the form
used to talk about actions or events in the future ('will ...').
Examples are:
If you wish to change a verb, for example to order someone
to do something, then you must take off the ending and add a
different one. The ending you add depends on which class the
verb belongs to. For example:
There are other endings to show other meanings, like present
('is doing ...'), or past ('did ...'), continuously doing, and so
on. These are part of the gammar of Gamilaraay.
Some Gamilaraay words containing a hyphen are listed
under other words. These are the compound words. Their first
part is the root (the word they appear under) and the
last part is a suffix which modifies the meaning of the root. There
are many suffixes in Gamilaraay.
For example, you will find yuularaay 'full up, sated'
listed under its root yuul :
The same suffix is seen in the language name Gamilaraay ,
as in:
Following the Gamilaraay word is a code for the type of word,
that is, what grammatical part of speech it is. It is important to
know what type of word is to be used because this affects the
endings that it will take and also where you can put it in the
sentence. The types of words in Gamilaraay are:
All the verbs have v for their part of speech.
Gamilaraay verbs are divided into two types:
The following sentences show the two types of verbs:
Next you will find one or more translations of the Gamilaraay
word's meaning into English. The translations give the nearest
word in English, but translations are never quite the same in
meaning. To understand the meaning fully, you need to ask a
Gamilaraay speaker.
Sometimes one Gamilaraay word corresponds to
two or more English words. Multiple translations with unrelated
meanings are are numbered (eg. 1, 2, 3); those that
are related are labelled with letters (a, b, c etc.). Compare
the following examples:
Following names for some birds and animals you will
find a Latin term that scientists use. These scientific
names come from some standard reference
books ; a reference to the book and the page number follows
each scientific name, for example:
Following the translation you will sometimes find extra
information about the word or its meaning. There are
several types:
Here are some examples:
There may also be some
links, or cross-references to other words
in the dictionary. These are labelled see also. You can
click on these links to go to the entry for the word displayed:
In the dictionary, you could click on marayin, mirri, or
buruma, and the hypertext dictionary would take you to
their entries.
We can also use writing (or spelling) to record
approximately how to pronounce words. The spelling system used
to write some languages, such as Italian, are clear and simple, but
the spelling for English is quite complicated.
The spelling system used for the Gamilaraay Dictionary is
simple and consistent; every sound is spelled just one way and
every letter or string of letters is pronounced just one way.
Gamilaraay has three simple vowels which are written a,
i, and u. These letters are pronounced as they are
for most European languages, not English:
Therefore:
There is another pronunciation of the letter a. After
w, a stands for an "o" sound, as in:
Some Gamilaraay words have long vowel sounds, which are
written with double letters:
Most of the letters for Gamilaraay consonants are used in the same
way as for English. However, some are different. Some pairs of
letters are pronounced as a single sound, just as English use
sh for the single sound at the beginning of
ship, or th for the single sound at the
beginning of thick.
Letters with the same sound as in English are:
The Gamilaraay dictionary
Sounds and spelling
THE GAMILARAAY LANGUAGE
Gamilaraay, also spelled Kamilaroi, is an Australian
Aboriginal language which was spoken over a vast area of
north-central New South Wales when Europeans began
colonising Australia. Gamilaraay country extended from as
far south as Murrurundi on the Great Dividing Range, to
Tamworth, Narrabri, Moree, Boggabilla, Mungindi,
Collarenebri, Walgett and Gunnedah.
THE GAMILARAAY DICTIONARY
Each entry in the dictionary consists of at least three parts:
For some entries there is additional information.
3. Translation
SOUNDS AND SPELLING
Every language in the world has its own system of pronunciation.
We can only learn to speak a language properly by listening to
people who speak it.
b d g l m n w y
To speakers of English, the Gamilaraay consonant sounds b, d, and g may sound like p, t, or k respectively, especially at the beginning of words. This is because the two languages have different sound systems. The Gamilaraay sounds are in reality half-way between the pairs of English sounds, so to English speakers Gamilaraay's b sometimes sounds like b and sometimes like p.
The following letters are used differently from English spelling:
Notice that many Gamilaraay words begin with ng , like ngaya 'I' and nginda 'you'.
In Gamilaraay the sound of n can come before g, so there are two sounds one after the other. To prevent confusion with the single sound ng, we write a full stop between the two letters to separate them (it looks like n.g). This is found in words like wan.guy 'pademelon wallaby'.
Vowels and consonants go together to make syllables. Words are made up of two, three, four or more syllables. For example, yira 'tooth' has two syllables: yi and ra, bumali 'to hit' has three syllables: bu, ma, and li.
The number of syllables affects the rhythm of a word's pronunciation.
In most languages, words are pronounced with greater stress or emphasis on some syllables than others. These stressed syllables sound louder and longer. For example, the English word 'woman' is pronounced with emphasis on the first syllable - it is WOman, not woMAN. Other words have the second syllable stressed, for example 'away' is aWAY not Away.
Gamilaraay also pronounces some syllables with more stress than others. Here are some rules for correctly pronouncing Gamilaraay words:
The Gamilaraay rule for syllable stress is simply:
"stress always goes on long (double) vowels or else on the first syllable if there is no long (double) vowel in the word."
Gamilaraay puts a weaker stress on the other syllables. This is especially important for pronouncing long words correctly. The principle for putting weak stress in the correct place is:
"weak stress goes on short vowels that are two syllables to the left or right of a stressed syllable"Here are some examples:
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