Talk:Bungandidj people

Name
I see from the history that this article was originally named Buandig and was moved to Bungandidj on 8 March 2012, but I can't find any discussion of the pros and cons.

There have been several different versions of this word, it seems partly because of the different ways European settlers and researchers heard the word and partly because of dialect differences.

The earliest recorded form is Buandic "found in Duncan Stewart’s notebook of 1835–54..., but he also uses Booandik, the spelling used by his mother, Christina Smith." (The Bunganditj (Buwandik) language of the Mount Gambier Region, Barry Blake, Pacific Linguistics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, 2004) It would make sense if all the quotes from Christina Smith's book actually quoted her spelling.

Blake continues:

Tindale records a pronunciation Puŋandik (I use bold for modern phonetic notation or my transcription, and italics for early amateur notations). Of the other primary sources, Dawson (1881:76) gives quite a different version of this name, namely Bung'andaetch, and John Mathew records that Bugandity or Buganity was the pronunciation used by speakers of the Warmambool language (Clark 1990:411). Mathews considered Smith's Booandik erroneous and used Bungandity. It seems that variants with and without ng are legitimate, as are versions with final tj or final k. There is a correspondence between a final -k in the northern dialects related to Bunganditj and a final -tj in the Warnambool language, though the final -k is dropped altogether in Bunganditj itself. The name seems to be basically a name for the people rather than the language. ...

A reviewer suggests that Buwandik may be an amateur mishearing of a pronunciation of Bungandik in which the velar nasal is reduced to nasalisation. Although this has some phonetic plausibility, it is not common to find such a reduction, and Stewart had a long association with the language. It could be that such a reduction took place historically. In other words, Bungandik may be an older form from which Buwandik was a current reflex at the time the name was taken down. I will use Bunganditj, the form used by Mathews, the form adopted by Tindale, and the form most used today.

I will try to work some of this into the article when I get a chance (it's a little messy name-wise at the moment), but I find it interesting that the name of this article is not one of the spellings canvassed by Blake. Voicing (or otherwise) of stops was probably not phonemically important, but it seems more usual to show initial and final stops unvoiced.

☸ Moilleadóir ☎ 10:22, 11 June 2013 (UTC)