[continued]

Come to think of it, at the 'Native School' set up here in Adelaide in 1840, the kids were taught in the Kaurna language, but by 1842, so many people had come in from the upper Murray, causing so much friction between the groups, that another school had to be set up at Walkerville: the kids there were taught in English - partly, of course, because there were no teachers familiar with any of the upper Murray languages.

Probably only the explorer E. J. Eyre, an unpaid 'sub-protector' at Murrundie (Blanchetown) was one of the only whitefellas who could speak any of those languages. He put together as grammar and also a vocabulary of the languages, funded by the governor George Grey: I checked out the vocab and as far as I could tell, almost not a single word was similar to the Ngarrindjeri language just a bit further down the River. [But there may be a couple of upper-Murray words which have been adopted by Ngarrindjeri people these days].

It's available on my web-site, www.firstsources.info , on the 'Key Early S.A. Documents' page.

Joe

Hi Joe,

Language and culture are bound together. The use of language forming an integral part of culture. Its difficult with a few hundred indigenous Australian languages, and many dialects contained within those languages. The advantage with Maori is the limited number of dialects, and the fact a written form has been developed. There is still a large number of speakers, and would-be speakers such as myself, around to keep the language alive. My wife runs a free Google Classroom online teaching the "old" language. With the language being taught in schools these days, there has been a lot of "Anglicising" of words, eg pinko for pink, not mawhero, its not a hard language to learn, except for me. Words are easy enough, pronunciation is harder, I can't roll the tongue correctly, and grammar, that's a lot harder to get right.Then there is context to consider, the use of long and short vowels etc etc all creates lingo problems for us slow learners.

Hi Paul,

I've been fascinated by the life and work (and tribulations and temptations) of Mr Kendall, the first teacher at the first (European-style) school in New Zealand, set up in 1816 in the Bay of Islands:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40841-015-0026-8?shared-article-renderer

The poet Henry Kendall's grandfather :). Interesting times.

Joe