Conocotarius, George Washington - eventually

I don't live in Central Australia and haven't since the 1980s. It's been an important strand in my life though, given expression partly in our piece, Journey to Horseshoe Bend. And I guess I think of Central Australia every day. I see myself there. When I am there, visiting in person, I can still see the landscape in vivid detail when I shut my eyes of a night. It's as if it imprints itself on the inside of my eyelids. I sometimes wonder whether it's to do with the power of Central Australia's colours - yellow spinifex growing in red soil, the oranges and purples, the vapoury blue of distant peaks. Aldous Huxley once advanced a theory that stained glass is used in churches because bright colours penetrate deep into our spirit.
 
But it's also the languages I miss. In Sydney I'm not regularly hearing Aranda, the language of the area around Alice Springs and Hermannsburg (Ntaria) and Horseshoe Bend. I don't hear those four or so languages you might hear as you walk down the street in Alice Springs. As an exercise to keep in touch I often rewrite the different orthographies.

As an oral language Aranda, or Arrernte, has been written several ways in the past 100 or so years. When Spencer and Gillen were doing their researches at the remote Alice Springs Telegraph Station in the 1890s they wrote down what they heard by ear.

The Alice Springs Telegraph Station in the 1880s. Public domain

No linguists, they had no system for transcribing the words. And I found myself the other night rewriting sentences they'd quoted in 1899's Native Tribes of Central Australia into the more modern Eastern Arrernte script devised by the Institute for Aboriginal Development in the 1980s.

Arakutja wunka oknirra unta munja aritchika [Spencer and Gillen's translation: Plenty of young women, you look and go quickly.]

became

Arrweketye awenke akngerre unte mwenye aretyeke.

I've often found writing in different orthographies a good method for working out how unheard languages might sound. I like to think that since I know a bit of Pitjantjatjara, from northern South Australia, not far (relatively speaking) from Alice Springs, I might have a clue to how languages even further south, like Kaurna the Adelaide language, may have sounded when it was in regular use. I would imagine that all the Central and South Australian languages, those in the central strip extending even to the southern coast, emphasised the first syllable, since that is a common feature of languages around Australia (either first syllable or first syllable after a consonant).

I think you can play this comparison game with American languages. If you look to the US and compare 'Cherokee' with an alternative, preferred spelling 'Tsalagi' (first spelt as 'Chalaque' in De Soto's Portuguese narrative of 1557), you can imagine that originally the 'ch' of Cherokee was more 'hissy' like a 'ts', the 'r' was further back in the throat where 'l' sits, and the 'k' and the 'g' were not very distuinguishable.

My favourite example of this however, is the word: 'hanadahguyas'.

To this day, the Iroquois people of the US northeast address the president of the United States as Hanadahguyus. It means 'town destroyer'. When the Iroquois invited Bill Clinton to the 200th anniversary celebrations of the Treaty of Canandaigua in 1994, the letter to him was addressed to Hanadahguyus, President Bill Clinton, 'hanadahguyas' being a title that has been given to all 44 presidents because it was first given to Washington.

In 1753 young George Washington, then a colonel in the British Virginia militia, ventured into the Ohio country. He met the Seneca chief Tanacharison, or The Half-King. Tanacharison addressed Washington by the name the tribe had given Washington's grandfather. Washington wrote the word as 'Conocotarius'. They had given John Washington this name because he destroyed their villages. But 'conocotarius' doesn't look anything like 'hanadahguyus'. Could it  really be the same word? Well perhaps, if the initial 'c' in 'Conocotarius' is rasping like the 'ch' in the German 'hoch', and the 't' is between a 't' and a 'd', as in many languages. 'The 'r' might have been an indeterminable liquid, easily a 'y'. I can't explain the 'd' where 'Conocotarious has a second 'c'.

But if both words really do mean 'town destroyer' and they're just different ways of writing it, what I most like about the way Washington wrote it is that he gave it a Roman shape. 'Hanadahguyus' doesn't look like the name of a Roman hero. Conocotarius does. Was young Washington, in 1753, already monumentalising himself?

Houdon's statue of Washington in the Virginia State Capitol. Lifesize, it has been placed way above us by the pedestal.