The Dyirbal ‘ mother-in-law language ’

WORD CORRESPONDENCES BETWEEN EVERYDAY AND MOTHER-IN- LAW LANGUAGES

Every user of Dyirbal had at his disposal two distinct languages:

(1) Guwal, the unmarked or ‘everyday’ language; and

(2) Dyalquy, a special (so called ‘mother-in-law’- see Capell 1962, Thomson 1935) language used in the presence of certain ‘taboo’ relatives.

When a man was talking within hearing distance of his mother-in-law, for instance, he had exclusively to use Dyalquy, for talking on any topic; when man and wife were conversing alone they could use only Guwal. The use of one language or the other was entirely determined by whether or not someone in proscribed relation to the speaker was present or near-by; there was never any choice involved.

Dyalquy has identical phonology and almost exactly the same grammar as Guwal.¹ However, it has an entirely different vocabulary, there being not a single lexical word common to Dyalquy and Guwal.

Confronted with a Guwal word a speaker will give a unique Dyalquy ‘ equivalent ’. And for any Dyalŋuy word he will give one or more corresponding Guwal words. It thus appears that the two vocabularies are in a one-to-many correspondence: each Dyalŋuy word corresponds to one or more Guwal words (and the words so related are in almost all cases not cognate with each other). For instance, Guwal contains a number of names for types of grubs, including d^vambun ‘ long wood grub ’, bugulum ‘small round bark grub’, mandid^va ‘milky pine grub’, gid^va ‘candlenut tree grub ’, gaban ‘ acacia tree grub ’; there is no Guwal generic term covering all five types of grub. In Dyalŋuy there is a single noun d^vamuy ‘grub’ corresponding to the five Guwal nouns; greater specificity can only be achieved in Dyalŋuy by adding a qualifying phrase or clause - describing say the color, habitat or behavior of a particular type of grub - to d^vamuy.

The ease with which Guwal-Dyalŋuy correspondences reveal semantic groupings can be seen from the following example.

A bilingual informant who offered single word glosses for Guwal verbs identified nudin, gunban and ban^vin all as ‘ cut ’. But Dyalŋuy correspondents are:

bubaman is also the correspondent of Guwal baygun and d^vindan. The meanings of these verbs can be explained as follows:

ban^vin, which at first appeared to be related to nudin and gunban, is thus seen, on the basis of Dyalŋuy data, to be related to baygun and dvindan, as further specifications of the Dyirbal concept ‘ shake, wave or bash ’; whereas nudin and gunban are further specifications of the quite different concept ‘ cut ’.

Dyalŋuy contains far fewer words than Guwal - something of the order of a quarter as many. Whereas Guwal has considerable hypertrophy, Dyalŋuy is characterized by an extreme parsimony. Every possible syntactic and semantic device is exploited in Dyalŋuy in order to keep its vocabulary to a minimum, it still being possible to say in Dyalŋuy everything that can be said in Guwal. The resulting often rather complex correspondences between Guwal and Dyalŋuy vocabularies are suggestive of the underlying semantic relations and dependencies for the language.

In some cases a Dyalŋuy word corresponds to Guwal items belonging to different word classes. The major word classes in Dyirbal are, on syntactic grounds, noun, whose members refer to objects, spirits, language and noise; adjective, referring to quantities, qualities, states and values of objects; verb, referring to action and perception; adverbal, referring to qualities and values of action and perception; and time qualifiers. Adjectives modify nouns and agree with them in case; in exactly the same way adverbals modify verbs and agree with them in transitivity, and in tense or other final inflection. Now some adjectives refer to qualities of objects that are exactly analogous to qualities of actions, dealt with through adverbals. Dyalŋuy exploits this similarity by having a single word where Guwal has both an adjective and a non-cognate adverbal. Thus Guwal adjective wunay ‘slow’ has Dyalŋuy equivalent wurgal; Guwal intransitive adverbal wundin^yu ‘do slowly’ is rendered in Dyalŋuy by the intransitively verbalized form of the adjective wurgal, that is wurgalbin. In other cases a state, described by a Guwal adjective, may be the result of an action, described in Guwal by a verb. Dyalŋuy will exploit this relation of ‘consequence’ (cf. Lyons 1963.73), having either just a verb or just an adjective where Guwal has both verb and adjective. Thus Guwal adjective yagi ‘ broken, split, torn’ has Dyalŋuy correspondent yilgil', Guwal verb ɽulban ‘to split’ is in Dyalŋuy yilgilman, the transitively verbalized form of the adjective yilgil. And Guwal transitive verb n^yad^yun ‘to cook’ is in Dyalŋuy durman, Guwal adjective n^yamu ‘ cooked ’ has Dyalŋuy correspondent durmanmi, the perfective participle of the verb durman. Guwal-Dyalŋuy word correspondences thus reveal the semantic connection between certain quality adjectives and certain quality adverbals; and between certain state adjectives and certain ‘ affect ’ verbs.

¹ Grammatical differences are only differences of degree: Dyalŋuy makes much more use of verbalisation and nominalisation processes than does Guwal; and so on.