The only fluent speaker of the Thaynakwith people’s language, Dr Thanakupi Gloria Fletcher, has just produced a dictionary “that includes the traditional stories, songs and art of the Thaynakwith people” of western Cape York, with the help of other community members, and Bruce Sommer and Geoff Wharton. It was praised by Peter Beattie – wonderful to see a major government figure interested in Indigenous languages.
Dr Fletcher hopes it will be used in schools in Weipa.
“I hope that it will happen, that somebody will carry it and carry it through into the future. I hope that anybody that reads the book will happily feel that they would like to read the language,” she said.
I haven’t yet found out who the publisher is, or how to get it – it’s not yet in the National Library of Australia.
[Update: it is listed in the NLA catalogue – thanks David]
Author: Thancoupie, Gloria Fletcher, 1937-
Title: Thanakupi’s guide to language and culture : a Thaynakwith dictionary / Gloria Fletcher Thancoupie.
Publisher: North Sydney, N.S.W. : Jennifer Isaacs Arts & Publishing, 2007.
Pre-publication record. Not yet published.
The confusion seems to have arisen as to whether Thancoupie or Fletcher is her surname, since she uses Thancoupie or Thanakupi as an artist’s name. Here’s what a Cairns Regional Gallery piece (.pdf) says:
From 1972 Gloria Fletcher began using her traditional name ‘Thancoupie’ meaning Wattle Flower, in recognition of her birth heritage from the Weipa region of Cape York Peninsula
[ Even so, my EndLink search should have found it in the catalogue. Not the first time I’ve drawn false negatives on Endlink.]
.
What’s the language? Ethnologue isn’t too hot on these names, so over to Cape York specialists. In the meantime here’s what you can learn from checking out Terry Crowley’s 1981 description (p.149 ).*
East of the Anguthimri, on the northern side of the the Mission River, were the various awŋt̻im-speaking groups (from awŋ ‘I’ and -t̻im ‘proprietive’). The known Awngthim groups are:
t̻anikwit̻i (called t̻yanŋayt̻ by the Linngithigh) – the mangrove area north of the Mission River
[… and two others]
This variety seems to be distinct from the Thaenganakwatha, which Crowley thought was close to Anguthimri. The people, he writes, lived along the southern bank of the lower Ducie River.
*Crowley, Terry, 1981, Mpakwithi dialect of Anguthimri. In Robert M. W. Dixon and Barry J. Blake, eds. Handbook of Australian languages Volume 2, 146-194. Canberra: The Australian National University Press.
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