From David Nash
Narcisse Pelletier1 (1844-1894) spent half his adult life (1858-1875) with Aboriginal people on the eastern coast of Cape York Peninsula. He learnt their language and had no contact with outsiders, and in time he lost command of his native French. His removal from the coast at Night Island was as out of his control and as sudden as had been his arrival there seventeen years earlier. He then regained command of French over subsequent weeks and months, and upon return to his birthplace in France, he was interviewed by Constant Merland (1808-85) a French surgeon-turned-savant. Merland's 1876 book Dix-sept ans chez les sauvages: Narcisse Pelletier is quite rare and apparently not held in any Australian library. It had been overlooked as an ethnographic source but last month it has appeared afresh and "Now, for the first time, this remarkable true story is presented in English, complemented by an in-depth introductory essay and ethnographic commentary" as the blurb accurately states.
The translator and annotator Stephanie Anderson has marshalled the help of anthropologists and linguists Athol Chase, David Thompson, Bruce Rigsby, Peter Sutton, and Clair Hill. Between them they show that the people who adopted Pelletier were speakers of a dialect of the language now known as Lockhart River 'Sand Beach' language comprising Kuuku Yaʔu and Umpila, probably the dialect known as Uutaalnganu, AIATSIS code Y211.
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The full account is spread through Pelletier : the forgotten castaway of Cape York published by Melbourne Books. The volume includes an ethnographic commentary by Athol Chase and an introductory essay by Stephanie Anderson who you might have heard talk about this in mid July on ABC's Late Night Live.
Merland has a chapter on language. He had taken down some 70 words and a few longer expressions as recalled by Pelletier, but before he presents these, he starts from the general, "How thought is expressed":
one point on which most people agree is that the degree of civilisation of different peoples can be gauged from the degree to which their language has evolved (p185)
Merland found that the language he recorded from Pelletier did not have the primitive properties that contemporary theorists described. Merland refers to the view that
Man’s first words were necessarily imitative words, onomatopoeic words, as grammarians call them (p185)
then points out that, on the contrary, judging from Pelletier's vocabulary,
while there are still numerous monosyllabic words in our highly evolved language of French, these have completely disappeared from the language spoken by the savages of Endeavour Land. (p191)
Indeed, Merland records not one monosyllabic word -- just as we with hindsight would expect of a Pama-Nyungan language(!).
Merland's transcription (possibly influenced by Pelletier's own spelling suggestions) has a few words with syllable-initial tr. These words match up with phonemic apical stop (apico-alveolar or possibly -domal) in Kuuku Yaʔu as recorded by the Rev DA Thompson (1988):
Merland gloss Kuuku Yaʔu gloss troutrou fowl tuutu scrub fowl troucoullou turtle sp. tukulu green turtle Traouais man in the moon taway moon bomtreuille eye ? atraba foot taʔu foot
Phonetically a French syllable-initial /tr/ is a coarticulated [t] and uvular [ʀ] -- and apparently the combination was used to capture a perceived quality of the Australian language's /t/, maybe retroflexion.
By way of contrast, there are some syllable-initial t in the Frenchmen's transcription of other words, and some of these might correspond to Kuuku Yaʔu interdental stop th but these matches (of form or meaning) are not straightforward: the clearest could be tallée 'stomach' if it is indeed Kuuku Yaʔu thulʔi 'stomach (internal)'. This fits with the finding that
The major linguagraphic class employed in stop production is apical in English and apicolaminal in French (Dart 1991:32) 4
There could also be misreadings of handwriting, but we don't have Merland's papers to check this (p132n2).
There are a few comments on gesture or sign language, notably a description of the signs for counting to ten across the upper body (p192).
So, the record is tantalising about the language Pelletier learnt, the more so when one learns of further primary records which are not extant:
- Lt Ottley's vocabulary of about 100 words recorded on the vessel which first carried Pelletier away on 11 April 1875 (p33,307)
- a separate vocabulary from Pelletier by linguist Léon-Jacques Bureau (1836-1900) (p69)
- "notes taken by Pelletier himself" (p132)
- Ottley's pencil sketches of two localities as indicated by Pelletier (p308n8,359)
Poignantly the information from Pelletier is apparently the only record of this particular dialect, which was absorbed into its neighbours in the 20th century at the Lockhart River missions. The linguistic detective work which has equated it with Uutaalnganu and part of the 'Sand Beach' language was also the clincher in pinpointing the location where Pelletier lived for those 17 years. Altogether this new volume has many concurrent threads and is a gripping read.
Notes
- The name Pelletier is pronounced [pɛltje] -- see the TLF entry.
- Thompson, David A. 1988. Lockhart River 'Sand Beach' language : an outline of Kuuku Ya'u and Umpila. Work Papers of SIL-AAIB A-11; also available as ASEDA item 0027.
- Dart, Sarah N. 1991. Articulatory and acoustic properties of apical and laminal articulations. Working Papers in Phonetics No. 79, UCLA. http://repositories.cdlib.org/uclaling/wpp/No79
- Thanks to Marija Tabain for the reference and helpful comments on the phonetics.
Comments
Thanks for alerting us, David. I’ll be getting of hold of this publication. I just thought I’d mention that I’ve been doing (over several years) some work on the manuscript left by Father Angelo Confalonieri in 1846. Confalonieri, a Jesuit missionary, was shipwrecked in the Torres Straits in the 1840s and ended up by accident at Port Essington on Coburg Peninsula in Northwest Arnhem Land, a shortlived attempt by the British to establish a presence on the north coast of the continent 30 or so years prior to the establishment of Darwin.
Like Pelletier, Confalonieri immediately set about learning the local language, Garig, and created a kind of thematic phrasebook in Garig and English, using an Italocentric orthography (e.g., gi = palatal stop, j = palatal glide). The text contains sections entitled, for instance, “Kitchen and Food”. Unlike Pelletier, however, Confalonieri only lived for a couple of years before succumbing to malaria. His grave is situated near the present-day Black Point ranger station.
I recently linked up on Cobourg with an Italian documentary team from Trento, Confalonieri’s home town, and was interviewed by them, along with David Minyimak, an elderly indigenous man with close associations to the area (it’s his mother country), who retains some orally passed-down knowledge of Confalonieri’s presence. I’ll be linking up with the author of the documentary, Rolando Pizzini, in Trento in October to discuss further collaboration. While there, I'll be taking steps to see what the chances are of publishing an annotated version of the manuscript, held now in the Propaganda Fide repository of the Vatican.
Towards the end of the interview I was asked what I thought was the significance of Confalonieri’s contribution. Among other things, what came to mind was the fact that (leaving aside consideration of his ultimate motivations) he’d seen language documentation and language learning as crucial first steps in forming a relationship with the local people, and that 160 years later mainstream Australia has failed to take this on (see, among many others, the excellent recent analysis of the indigenous education sphere by Simpson, Caffrey, and McConvell). The Italian team was shocked at this, and after a moment’s pause wanted to know why I thought this was the case, asking, “Is it white supremacy?”
What would you have answered?
Posted by: Bruce Birch | August 17, 2009 11:39 AM
“Is it white supremacy?”, asked by Italians - as unanswerable as Ali G's "“Is it cos I's black?”
Posted by: Nicholas Ostler | August 17, 2009 07:45 PM
The Confalonieri story is also gripping, but is not so parallel to Peltier's. Confalonieri wanted to be a missionary; he had writing materials and other equipment; he wasn't completely immersed in another society and dependent upon it. He had earlier been shipwrecked (in a group) but not stranded. No matter, glad to hear his manuscript is getting this attention.
Posted by: David Nash | August 18, 2009 09:02 AM
Thanks for your great summary, David. Can I advise readers of this blog that the original text by Merland (1876) is held by the State Library of Victoria? AIATSIS have now digitised the only copy I have been able to procure of the book. It is not yet catalogued but should be soon. It will be available on CD to consult in the Library or online. I shall advise further when I have their catalogue entry. If any readers have any ideas about how we might track down Ottley's word list please let me know!
Posted by: Stephanie Anderson | September 16, 2009 12:16 PM
Thanks! Indeed, there it is in the SLV catalogue. (I relied on its absence from Libraries Australia.)
Posted by: David Nash | September 16, 2009 05:01 PM