Revised edition of: Dying words. 2010. Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary:
"In the oral traditions of northwestern Arnhem Land, the first human to enter the Australian continent was the ancestress Warramurrungunji, who came out of the Arafura Sea on Croker Island near the Cobourg Peninsula, having traveled from Macassar in Indonesia. Her first job was to sort out the right rituals so that the many children she gave birth to along the way could survive, and the hot mounds of sand, over which she and all women thereafter would have to purify themselves after childbirth, remain in the landscape as the giant sandhills along Croker Island's northern coasts. Then she headed inland, and as she went she put different children into particular areas, decreeing which languages should be spoken where. Ruka kundangani riki angbaldaharrama! Ruka nuyi nuwung inyman! 'I am putting you here, this is the language you should talk! This is your language!' she would say, in the Iwaidja version of the story, naming a different language for each group and moving on. The Judeo-Christian tradition sees the profusion of tongues after the Tower of Babel as a negative outcome punishing humans for their presumption, and standing in the way of cooperation and progress. But the Warramurrungunji myth reflects a point of view much more common in small speech communities: that having many languages is a good thing because it shows where each person belongs. Don Laycock quotes a man from the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea saying 'it wouldn't be any good if we all talked the same; we like to know where people come from.' The Tzotzil oral traditions of the Mexican Chiapas give another twist to this tune: 'while the sun was still walking on the earth, people finally learned to speak (Spanish), and all people everywhere understood each other. Later the nations and municipios were divided because they had begun to quarrel. Language was changed so that people would learn to live together peacefully in smaller groups.'"-- Provided by publisher.
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