Abstract
We consider the words originating from the English word ‘bamboo’ borrowed into the indigenous languages of northern Australian and denoting the didjeridu (drone pipe) or other aerophones. The word ‘bamboo’ must have been first acquired by speakers of Australian Aboriginal languages in the 19th century, and in north Australia where the large stem plant is endemic, namely in the region of Darwin. The available data is organised in support of an hypothesised spread whereby the word was applied to the aerophone made from bamboo, and then to similar aerophones made of other wood. In this sense, ‘bamboo’ (as pampu) spread inland southwards, and eastwards to western Cape York Peninsula. In western Cape York Peninsula the word lost the final vowel, and in this form was borrowed southwards and applied to the particular aerophone the ‘emu caller’, used to attract the emu (a large flightless game bird). A comparable distribution is collated for an indigenous word denoting aerophones: kurlumpu(rr) and corresponding forms in various north Australian languages. The study demonstrates how some etymological headway can be made on loanwords in languages with only a recent documentary record.
It is a pleasure to associate this paperlet with Lauri Carlson. We knew each other as fellow graduate students in linguistics at MIT, and also shared a group apartment. Lauri would occasionally put to us his roommates (mostly native speakers of English of various kinds) that a (to us implausible) pair of English words would prove to be etymologically related, and invariably on us reaching for dictionaries he would turn out to be right. An earlier version appeared as blog posts (Nash 2011a, 2011b). I am grateful to the editors for providing this opportunity, and for their forebearance.
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Notes
- 1.
represents l-with-dot-under, the apico-domal lateral. Blake (1979: 4) noted that ‘All the informants spoke English in most situations, some of them using a fair admixture of Pidgin features.’
- 2.
Blake and I exchanged a number of email messages on this in April–May 2011.
- 3.
Breen was working through a set of elicitation sentences that Blake had drawn up.
- 4.
Here I revert to the spellings of Blake (1979), cast in a practical orthography whereby e.g. rl is the apico-domal lateral; and ignoring the phonetic length marking of the first vowel in i.ni.
- 5.
Local English. How and when the pamp word came to also denote the introduced castor bean plant calls for integration into my account. Edwards and Black (1998) list the same word yok pamp ‘castor bean (Ricinus communis)’ in Kokoberrin, a neighbouring language to the south; no word is listed denoting an aerophone or bamboo. The castor bean plant and bamboo have in common that they have hollow jointed stems (as drawn to my attention by David Wilkins, p.c.) and they are fast growing, suckering, colony forming plants.
- 6.
The “interactive map shows the major areas in the ‘Top End’ of Australia where the didgeridoo is traditionally found”, in Exhibition of Didgeridoos. Memmott (1980: 271–272) recorded the word pampu ‘didjeridu’ in oral history recalling new artefacts that came to Mornington Island with the Morning Star in the 1920s–30s.
- 7.
Somewhat surprisingly Arthur’s (1996) earliest citation is as late as 1969; along with a 1957 reference to bamboo puller ‘a didgeridoo player’. These are antedated by Worms (1953: 278): “the Arnhem Land tribes also have a ‘bamboo’, a sort of crude trumpet made from a narrow branch of a tree”. Balfour’s (1901) title applied the expression “bambu trumpets” in 1901. It might be thought that as bambu is a Malay word it could have been borrowed through Makassarese (Mkr) contact rather than through English; however Walker and Zorc (1981: 118) list only bamutuka ‘pipe’ < Mkr ‘bamboo opium pipe’ root word Mkr uduʔ, Malay udut ‘to suck-at, smoke’.
- 8.
There is a rock art image of a human figure playing a didjeridu in Kakadu National Park (Chaloupka 1993) which may well predate Wilson’s drawing.
- 9.
Balfour (1901: 33) includes a photograph of ‘three bambu trumpets … from the Alligator tribe, Port Essington’ in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. See items 1900.55.273 and 274 and 1900.71.12 in the databases at http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk.
- 10.
- 11.
Roth’s (1902: 23–24) report was from further east, from north-east Queensland.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Kim Akerman, Barry Alpher, Barry Blake, Gavan Breen, Yukihiro Doi , Murray Garde, Philip Jones, Grace Koch, Harold Koch, Frances Kofod, Patrick McConvell and Peter Sutton for assistance, and to Aet Lees and Fred Karlsson for helpful review comments. I have benefited from the Pama-Nyungan etymological database funded by NSF grant 844550 ‘Pama-Nyungan and Australian Prehistory’ awarded to Claire Bowern. Thanks also to ANU Cartography for preparing the map, and to Nic Peterson for the question which started me on this.
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Nash, D. (2012). “It’s Etymology Captain, but Not as We Know It”: Pump in North Australia. In: Santos, D., Lindén, K., Ng’ang’a, W. (eds) Shall We Play the Festschrift Game?. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30773-7_2
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