The German missionaries at Killalpaninna developed a spelling system for Diyari which became a standard for all materials written in the language from about 1890, including the Dieri Bible, published in 1897. The spelling used by Reuther more-or-less follows the mission orthography, but with quite a bit of inconsistency and variation. To search the online Dictionaries you need to use Reuther’s spelling, and sometimes you may need to try several alternatives to find the Diyari word you are looking for. Searching by English meanings may help; the ‘user-friendly’ version is specially set up to enable easy searching. The modern Diyari spelling system is presented here.
Reuther shows the following variations in his spelling:
- p and b
- t and d
- k and g
- r and rr
- o and u
- i and e
Reuther’s j is the sound we now spell as y, tj is now written ty (and sounds like ch in church), nj is now written ny (and sounds like the first n in onion). So, for example, ‘kangaroo’ in Reuther’s spelling is tjukuru whereas the modern spelling is tyukurru.
Reuther’s t and d do not distinguish sounds that are quite different in Diyari, resulting in words being spelled the same by him where they would be different in the modern spelling, e.g. kadi for both kardi ‘brother-in-law’ and karti ‘raw, uncooked’, terti for both thati ‘middle’ and thardi ‘thirsty’.
Similarly, Diyari has three ‘r-sounds’ but Reuther does not distinguish them, and his r and rr can stand for any of these sounds. This can sometimes lead to confusion, e.g. nguru ‘another’ (for nguru) and nguru ‘strong’ (for ngurru), or baru ‘yellow’ (for paru) and paru ‘fish’ (for parru).
In the Dictionary entries the modern spelling is given as *Spelling or *Morphology, where it is known, and CHECK where it is not (some of Reuther’s words have not been able to be checked with people who speak Diyari). If there are alternative pronunciations these appear after *Also:.
To go to the Dictionary specialist edition click here.
To go to the Dictionary user-friendly edition click here.