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Kaiadilt
The Kaiadilt are an Aboriginal Australian people of the South Wellesley group in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Queensland, Australia. They are native to Bentinck Island, but also made nomadic fishing and hunting forays to both Sweers and Allen Islands. Most Kaiadilt people now live on Mornington Island.
The Kayardild language is an agglutinating, completely suffixing member of the Tangkic languages, but unlike most Australian languages, including others classified under Tangkic including Yukulta, Kayardild exhibits a case morphology that is accusative, rather than ergative. Etymologically Kayardild is a compound formed from ka (ng) 'language' and yardild (a) 'strong', thus meaning 'strong language'.
Analysis of the grammar of Kayardild revealed that it provided an empirical challenge to a theorem regarding putative linguistic universals in natural languages. Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom asserted that "no language uses noun affixes to express tense", a claim that reflected a tradition in Western thought going back to Aristotle. Nicholas Evans discovered a breach in the theory, for Kayardild happens to inflect not only verbs, but also nouns, for tense.
Kayardild was spoken by no more than perhaps 150 people, and by 1982, when Nicholas Evans began to record it, the numbers had declined to approximately 40. By 2005, only seven fluent speakers remained, and the last speaker of classical Kayardild died in 2015, though it is also reported that there was still one fluent female speaker as late as February 2017.
The territory of Bentinck Island and its contiguous reefs amount to roughly 70 square miles (180 km2); the nation's western border lay at Allen Island.
The Kaiadilt were mainly centred on Bentinck Island. Unlike many other northern Aboriginal groups, particularly those of Arnhem Land, they appear to have had little contact with Southern Asian island traders such as the Makassans, something attested by the lack of loanwords from the Malay, Buginese and Makassarese languages, though some early records indicate tamarind and teak had been harvested by visitors who had axes, and earthenware pots have been uncovered. They were generally diffident with strangers. The first white man to have set foot on the island was Matthew Flinders, captain of HMS Investigator in 1802.[citation needed]
Sometime around 1916, a man remembered only as McKenzie came to Bentinck Island and set up a sheep run, basing himself on a site at the mouth of the Kurumnbali estuary. He would ride over the island, accompanied by a pack of dogs, and shoot any Kaiadilt man who came within sight; in local memory, he murdered at least 11 people. He also kidnapped and raped native girls. He then moved to Sweers Island, and set up a lime kiln there. The Kaiadilt managed to return to Sweers only on McKenzie's departure. The massacre was only recorded by researchers in the 1980s.
Sweers Island was declared an Aboriginal reserve in 1934. After a cyclonic tidal surge swept the area in 1948, which followed fast on the severe drought that struck in 1946, the Kaiadilt were transferred by missionaries and the Queensland Government to Mornington Island. The uprooting effectively set in place the process of the destruction of both Kaiadilt culture and language since all children were restricted to dormitories, away from their parents and kin, and the transmission of the language and lore was lost. On Mornington Island they lived in a separate zone, in beach humpies facing Bentinck Island. They were looked down on by the Indigenous Lardil people, who denied them access to the fishing grounds. Conditions were so severe that for several years all children were stillborn, creating a gap in the generations. From the late 1960s onwards, the Kaiadilt began to return to their own islands.[citation needed]
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Kaiadilt
The Kaiadilt are an Aboriginal Australian people of the South Wellesley group in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Queensland, Australia. They are native to Bentinck Island, but also made nomadic fishing and hunting forays to both Sweers and Allen Islands. Most Kaiadilt people now live on Mornington Island.
The Kayardild language is an agglutinating, completely suffixing member of the Tangkic languages, but unlike most Australian languages, including others classified under Tangkic including Yukulta, Kayardild exhibits a case morphology that is accusative, rather than ergative. Etymologically Kayardild is a compound formed from ka (ng) 'language' and yardild (a) 'strong', thus meaning 'strong language'.
Analysis of the grammar of Kayardild revealed that it provided an empirical challenge to a theorem regarding putative linguistic universals in natural languages. Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom asserted that "no language uses noun affixes to express tense", a claim that reflected a tradition in Western thought going back to Aristotle. Nicholas Evans discovered a breach in the theory, for Kayardild happens to inflect not only verbs, but also nouns, for tense.
Kayardild was spoken by no more than perhaps 150 people, and by 1982, when Nicholas Evans began to record it, the numbers had declined to approximately 40. By 2005, only seven fluent speakers remained, and the last speaker of classical Kayardild died in 2015, though it is also reported that there was still one fluent female speaker as late as February 2017.
The territory of Bentinck Island and its contiguous reefs amount to roughly 70 square miles (180 km2); the nation's western border lay at Allen Island.
The Kaiadilt were mainly centred on Bentinck Island. Unlike many other northern Aboriginal groups, particularly those of Arnhem Land, they appear to have had little contact with Southern Asian island traders such as the Makassans, something attested by the lack of loanwords from the Malay, Buginese and Makassarese languages, though some early records indicate tamarind and teak had been harvested by visitors who had axes, and earthenware pots have been uncovered. They were generally diffident with strangers. The first white man to have set foot on the island was Matthew Flinders, captain of HMS Investigator in 1802.[citation needed]
Sometime around 1916, a man remembered only as McKenzie came to Bentinck Island and set up a sheep run, basing himself on a site at the mouth of the Kurumnbali estuary. He would ride over the island, accompanied by a pack of dogs, and shoot any Kaiadilt man who came within sight; in local memory, he murdered at least 11 people. He also kidnapped and raped native girls. He then moved to Sweers Island, and set up a lime kiln there. The Kaiadilt managed to return to Sweers only on McKenzie's departure. The massacre was only recorded by researchers in the 1980s.
Sweers Island was declared an Aboriginal reserve in 1934. After a cyclonic tidal surge swept the area in 1948, which followed fast on the severe drought that struck in 1946, the Kaiadilt were transferred by missionaries and the Queensland Government to Mornington Island. The uprooting effectively set in place the process of the destruction of both Kaiadilt culture and language since all children were restricted to dormitories, away from their parents and kin, and the transmission of the language and lore was lost. On Mornington Island they lived in a separate zone, in beach humpies facing Bentinck Island. They were looked down on by the Indigenous Lardil people, who denied them access to the fishing grounds. Conditions were so severe that for several years all children were stillborn, creating a gap in the generations. From the late 1960s onwards, the Kaiadilt began to return to their own islands.[citation needed]