A revised view of the verbal suffixes of Yugambeh-Bundjalung

Abstract

Among Terry Crowley's many achievements are his studies on two northern New South Wales languages. As an undergraduate, he made an important break-through in recognising Nganyaywana as a Pama-Nyungan language disguised by its loss of initial consonants or syllables (Crowley 1976), and in recent years he gave free time to Armidale's Minimhah School, in their work to teach traditional languages to descendants of those who spoke them. In his extensive work on Bandjalang (1978a), with speakers and semi-speakers from the Tabulam area, he was the first to correctly see the range of uses and meaning of the verbal affix '-li', and he had W. E. Smythe's valuable grammar of the Casino dialect (c. 1946) published as an appendix to his own grammar of Bandjalang (Crowley 1978a: 247-478). The Yugambeh-Bundjalung language was spoken (and still has limited use) in an area stretching from some 16km south of Brisbane to near Yamba on the New South Wales (NSW) coast just north of the Clarence River mouth, and inland just short of Tenterfield NSW and west of Warwick Queensland. (see Map 1). Based on lists and studies we have, there were around twenty dialects; we have grammatical analysis for six dialects.