Aboriginal Words: the Building Blocks of Aboriginal Rhetoric and Philosophy

From childhood, I have been filling out little family tree diagrams (like the one shown) and pedigree charts. As a basic part of my upbringing, I've learned the names for familial relationships: mom, dad, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, grandma, grandpa, niece, nephew, cousin etc. I've always thought that things get a little fuzzy in the realm of cousins - second cousins, third cousins, and what exactly does "removed" mean again? I know I've had it explained to me, but somehow I always end up confused.

Still, our system of names for describing family members is actually relatively simple... For many of the Aborigines of Australia, extreme complexities of relationships exist not only

on the level of cousins but on nearly every level. Figure this: A man's brother's children are his sons and daughters, but his sister's children are his nieces and nephews. But the grandchildren of both his sisters and his brothers are his grandchildren! How much sense does that make? And it's just one example of the complication that's in an Aboriginal family tree.

My point in sharing this example (besides that I think it's way interesting!) is to convey the idea that the names we have for things and concepts - our words - reflect on the most basic level the philosophy of our culture. Words also lay the foundation for the rhetoric of any language and culture. So the rhetoric of the Aborigines when it comes to discussing family matters is going to be a lot different from ours, because their words give them a different system for describing these relationships. And this different system reflects a different philosophy - one that places a much greater emphasis on gender roles, and particularly differences between gender roles.

To give a little background, Aborigines are the natives of Australia. According to a study completed earlier this year using a 100-year old lock of hair, they are "the population with the longest association with the land on which they live today," having arrived on the continent 50,000 years ago.

I found this fact particularly interesting because of something I learned about their language from a book I checked out from the library. Titled Folklore, Manners, Customs and Languages of the South Australian Aborigines, it is a compilation of government interviews from the late 1800s that were done to learn about various Aboriginal tribes. What I found out is that in many Aboriginal languages, words change extremely frequently. For example, in one tribe, the word for water was changed nine times in a period of five years. Why? People whose name meant water kept dying! Explanation: Anytime anyone who is named after something dies, they change the name of that thing to avoid speaking the name of the deceased. Again, this peculiarity of their language reflects an important part of their philosophy - these Aborigines believe in the continuing existence of spirits after death and fear that a departed spirit will appear if its name is even mentioned.

This made me wonder how much Aboriginal languages have changed over the thousands of years that the culture has been in existence. With such a system in place for the continual evolution of the language, I wonder whether the native words in use today even resemble those used anciently.

I have two opposing ideas about how such constant change of words and language could have affected the rhetoric of this culture: 1. The rhetoric has been made complex through the complexities of language arising out of constantly changing words. 2. The rhetoric has been kept at a very simple level because the constantly changing words hinder the development of more complicated communication at the broader level.

I want to find out more about this, but what do you think? What makes sense to you?