Nhurnti (nhandi)
If you look at a map of the Indonesian archipelago, you can draw a line running roughly southwest to northeast and cut it through the channel separating the Indonesian islands of Kalimantan and Sulawesi. This is called the Wallace Line (after explorer Alfred Russel Wallace, who first proposed it) and it is the line dividing the continent of Asia from the rough collection of islands, atolls and shoals known as Oceania. Oh, and Australia, New Guinea, etc. Those are there, too, but they didn't fit the big self-important sentence I was working on so I used artistic license and left them out.
Why this line? Because everything northwest of it contains what Colin McEvedy calls "an up-to-date fauna of placental mammals," while everything to the southeast does not. Australia and some of the larger islands are an enormous zoo hosting the addled and goofy sister-taxon to the placentals, marsupials, who have all-but died out everywhere else on Earth; the smaller islands and those volcanic islands which have never touched a major continent are home only to birds.
This is important because, at the height of the last ice-age, some 40,000 years ago, all of the islands of asia were either connected to the mainland, or within sight of land. Anything beyond the Wallace Line required the enterprising energy of homo-sapiens to reach. A feat accomplished by the ancestors of todays aboriginal Australians.
As the millennia progressed and the ice-age receded, these aboriginal peoples became almost as seperated from the rest of mankind as the marsupial had from their own kin millions of years earlier. To give an idea of how long ago human settlement of Australia occurred, 40,000 years ago Neanderthal Man was still contesting dominance of Europe with our stone-age ancestors, and in fact the existence of people in Australia is the only evidence we have that mankind had invented some kind of boat.
After the ice-age there was some sporadic contact between the Australians, New Guineans and the inhabitants of the wider world. Certainly the ancestors of the Polynesians passed through (even attempting settlement on New Guinea), and it is believed that the inhabitants of the north Queensland coast are late Melanesian arrivals, but aside from these, Australia existed in isolation for the better part of four hundred centuries.
Over time, the languages spoken on Australia diverged markedly. At the time European colonization began, there are believed to been 3 major language families on the continent, and some 350 distinct languages. Thanks to the British tradition of exterminating the natives in order to save them, many of these languages were killed off entirely, and many more are now poorly attested, with no native speakers. In recent years, the Australian government has learned to embrace aboriginal culture to some extent, and the 200 or so remaining languages are seeing something of a resurgence. One of these languages is Nhanda, traditionally spoken in the area around Shark Bay in western Australia. Although Nhanda has no living native speakers, there are still enough second-language speakers around to allow large portions of the languages lexicon and structure to be recorded, a task which has been undertaken by, among others, the Yamaji Language Centre.
And thanks to the fine work of these scholars, we know that the Nandha word for penis is nhurnti, and that this word also means "tail."
Why this line? Because everything northwest of it contains what Colin McEvedy calls "an up-to-date fauna of placental mammals," while everything to the southeast does not. Australia and some of the larger islands are an enormous zoo hosting the addled and goofy sister-taxon to the placentals, marsupials, who have all-but died out everywhere else on Earth; the smaller islands and those volcanic islands which have never touched a major continent are home only to birds.
This is important because, at the height of the last ice-age, some 40,000 years ago, all of the islands of asia were either connected to the mainland, or within sight of land. Anything beyond the Wallace Line required the enterprising energy of homo-sapiens to reach. A feat accomplished by the ancestors of todays aboriginal Australians.
As the millennia progressed and the ice-age receded, these aboriginal peoples became almost as seperated from the rest of mankind as the marsupial had from their own kin millions of years earlier. To give an idea of how long ago human settlement of Australia occurred, 40,000 years ago Neanderthal Man was still contesting dominance of Europe with our stone-age ancestors, and in fact the existence of people in Australia is the only evidence we have that mankind had invented some kind of boat.
After the ice-age there was some sporadic contact between the Australians, New Guineans and the inhabitants of the wider world. Certainly the ancestors of the Polynesians passed through (even attempting settlement on New Guinea), and it is believed that the inhabitants of the north Queensland coast are late Melanesian arrivals, but aside from these, Australia existed in isolation for the better part of four hundred centuries.
Over time, the languages spoken on Australia diverged markedly. At the time European colonization began, there are believed to been 3 major language families on the continent, and some 350 distinct languages. Thanks to the British tradition of exterminating the natives in order to save them, many of these languages were killed off entirely, and many more are now poorly attested, with no native speakers. In recent years, the Australian government has learned to embrace aboriginal culture to some extent, and the 200 or so remaining languages are seeing something of a resurgence. One of these languages is Nhanda, traditionally spoken in the area around Shark Bay in western Australia. Although Nhanda has no living native speakers, there are still enough second-language speakers around to allow large portions of the languages lexicon and structure to be recorded, a task which has been undertaken by, among others, the Yamaji Language Centre.
And thanks to the fine work of these scholars, we know that the Nandha word for penis is nhurnti, and that this word also means "tail."