GRIPES

[facthunter]

As far  as I know the aboriginal languages have NEVER been in written form, and "their" FLAG is a recent thing. An indigenous guide I had at Uluru one time was from Katherine and couldn't understand one word of the Local Lingo all of whom lived well out of town which is Ultra Modern, Costly and thoroughly out of character.. IMHO.  Nev

[old man emu]

While it is reasonable to use indigenous words that had/have meaning in the speech of the people who used them, it is ridiculous to apply words for things that did not exist for those people. As an example, would the concept of "stairway" ever have existed until stairways had been introduced by people who made them? I believe that when the first overland explorers reached northern Australia, near the ocean, the local indigines saw the rifles of the explorers and immediately called them 'musquit' or similar. The reason? They had seen the muskets of the Dutch and Malays who came to fish in the area before the British explorers arrived from the South. The explorers would have been carrying rifles.

[octave]

7 minutes ago, onetrack said:

The bulk of the place names in W.A. are Anglicised from the local Aboriginal dialects, and often are quite inaccurate in the translation - to the extent, that a pronunciation of the proper Aboriginal name of those places would be nearly impossible for most people.

I don't really see the problem here. I am sure there are British place names from old English and probably have changed over time.  I search the name of the village I lived in  Mongarlowe.  As far as I know there are no other towns with that name. Yes it is probably is not pronounced  accurately.   Do people have a problem with Woolomaloo?