Gundaa

Sharlenedu dhayay/asked.
I would like to move from a noun- ‘cloud’ to descriptive- ‘cloudy’.
Similar to from sun to sunny, etc. What suffix do i use to create the descriptive word. ie It is cloudy?

Thanks in advance.
Regards

Yaama Sharlene,
The is a simple answer and many longer answers. John Giacon

Simple answer

The suffix -Baraay ‘having, with’ [-araay after words ending in rr and l, -baraay elsewhere; in Narrabri, Collarenebri, Yallaroi and many other names, and milam-baraay (milk-having =) cow] could be added to gundaa ‘cloud’ > gundaabaraay ‘cloud having’.

A longer answer
starts with the belief that traditional GY has many wonderful features which are really different to English. They are worth keeping in the GY we are using now.

Which leads to the question:
How are we going to keep those features? One starting point is: Is that the way the old people would say it?

Remembering that we are English speakers, and we tend to use English patterns.
So, New Gamilaraay could be Gamilaraay used with English patterns;
Black words, English pattern. Black on the surface, white elsewhere.

What do we know about the old language?

Arthur Dodd [ad] and Janet Mathews [jm] are talking [tape 3218A]
In the next passage AD uses dhurralaanha ‘are coming up’ whereas JM says ‘are’
3218A 426.889 jm there are clouds in the sky now, and it might rain this afternoon,
3218A 440.579 ad giirr nhama gundaa , gundaa yaluu , dhurra-laa-nha dhaay ,

Here JM has ‘cloudy’, AD has dhaay galiyawaanha ‘are climbing to here’
3218A 2499.011 jm it is cloudy, it might rain
3218A 2504.41 ad gundaa ngarra-la, giirr , gundaa dhaay galiya-waa-nha ,
3218A 2511.345  dhama/dhamaa-y-badhaay-aa ,
3218A 2513.999 = it might rain, clouds coming up

Here AD says ‘the sky is breaking’, which in today’s English could be ‘the sky is clearing’/’the clouds are going’
3218B 1291.749 jm it might stop raining in the morning
3218B 1298.577 ad giirr-badhaay-aa-??ngu ; giirr-badhaay-aa ,
3218B 1311.387 waal-badhaay-aa dhama-y , giirr-bala , gunagala gama-laa-nha
3218B 1319.343 = the sky is breaking , cloud,

In a later tape, with Corinne Williams [cw], AD again uses ‘coming up’ of clouds, this time in English.

5050 995.555 ad = thundery cw cloud is thundery ad yeah cw gundaa = cloud ad yeah, gundaa is coming up

Here AD uses a totally different word for ‘thundercloud’, but again uses galiyay ‘climb’.
5052 583.711 ad that’s dharringarra , galiya-waa-nh[a = that’s when he’s coming up
5052 588.56 cw dharringarra/nganha?? galiya-waa-nha ad yeah cw thundercloud is coming up
5052 591.634 ad dhaay galiya-waa-nh[a , cw again

The passage is ad and jm:
8185 877.533 jm the clouds were low and more rain was coming
8185 882.042 ad mm [pauses]
8185 888.492 giirr nhama gundaa, ngadaa , guwiinbaa-ga maaya-waa-nhi

ngadaa is something like ‘down’ or ‘low’; guwiinbaa-ga ‘close’.
we aren’t sure about the meaning of maaya-y [the verb maaya-waa-nhi comes from] but it probably means ‘be up’. The GY dictionary has ma-y  ‘be up’; maybe that should be maya-y. There is a similar verb in Wangaaybuwan.

Conclusion, for now at least.

Arthur Dodd had many chances to say gunagala/sky gundaa-biyaay [YR has -biyaay where GR has -baraay]. So, if I was trying to say ‘the sky is cloudy’ I would use a verb, for now ma-y ‘be up’. Following the sentence in 8185:

Using ngarribaa ‘up’ if the clouds are high:
Giirr gundaa ngarribaa maylanhi.
The clouds are up high. There are high clouds.

Giirr gundaa gunagala-ga maylanhi.
There are clouds in the sky. The sky is cloudy.

A note on hybridity.
In language revival hybrid means that the revived language is a mixture of the traditional language and the speaker’s main language, for us English.
Any revived language is hybrid.
But it can become less hybrid if it is acknowledged that anything we do is on the basis of limited knowledge. [You can only use the traditional Gamilaraay that you know.] Then, as we learn more, we can change to a more traditional Gamilaraay.

Two examples of new understandings from the dictionary. [In other words the dictionary is incorrect in these two entries].

It has  
1. Giirr nhama maadhaay-u bura manuma-y. (YR)
The dog stole some bones.

We now know that a dog would have manu-dha-y, not manu-ma-y. The -ma-y here implies action with hand, the -dha-y has to do with mouth [cf dha-li ‘eat’, dhaal ‘cheek’]

2. gaalanha ‘and’
Gaalanha is not ‘and’. Gaala/gaalay is something like ‘two’ and -nha ‘he she it’.
We did not have much information about it when making the dictionary, but I suspect, as English speakers, we thought there must be a word for ‘and’ and this was a candidate, even if fairly unclear.
It is pretty clear now that the language does not have a word that corresponds to English ‘and’.
To say ‘Billy and I’ you say ‘ngali Billy’ ‘we two Billy’
To say ‘Billy and you’ you say ‘ngindaali Billy’ ‘you two Billy’
To say ‘Billy and Bonny’ you use a pronoun for ‘they two’, one of which seems gaalanha;  and get Billy gaalanha Bonny.

The lesson here is that traditional GY is very very different from English in many ways. Unless we had GY information and the reassurance of seeing similar structures in other Aboriginal languages we would never say ‘we two she’ for ‘me and her’, or keep the many other distinctive features of the languages.  

In summary: it is impossible not to use some English patterns in rebuilt GY. As you learn more about traditional GY your new GY can become more traditional.

There are also many situations where the GY traditional sources don’t provide the information. In those cases following related languages like Wangaaybuwan, Wayilwan and Wiradjuri, and other Aboriginal languages will lead to a more traditional language than following English.