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When I hear "chuffed" I think of how cockatoos put their feathers up over their lower beak when they're pleased with themselves (or sleepy); you can see Ngarritj and the others do this several times in that clip.

(the hopping in the aboriginal ceremonies reminded me of the very avian caucasian dances: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJ6FzIgKWl0 ; compare https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJHCaahJ4pY&t=52s )



Trad. aboriginal dance is very imitative (with creative twists), the movements of small animals, large animals, birds, etc are used for inspiration.

Here you can see the children of the Crocodile Islands group use the music of caucasian islanders for their muse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-MucVWo-Pw


Marrkap! Τερψιχόρη approves; after all she's not gurrutumiriw

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myKF9mxAJ70

[EDIT: and gu marryuna dhu marryuna may not exactly be a hyperlink, but it does serve as a songline.

TIL "Cockatoo" is a place, in the Top End]


Well done .. although Yolngu has to be the easiest (and not that easy at all) to pick up rough translations on the web - there are many* that don't feature at all given they're oral with no alphabet, phonetics came late with the missionairies and linguists.

Luritja: https://youtu.be/JjDlbCfybbE?t=27

and, of course, there's English as the modern lingua Pidgin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gw-AgvUEVm4

* https://mgnsw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/map_col_high...

Are you from Australia, or just a WWW fan of music from here?


As the spelling "Yolŋu" attests, I guess IPA goes a long way towards allowing dictionaries for non-alphabetic languages. (It's well known that the polynesians lost the t/k distinction moving eastward, in between settling Tahiti and Hawai'i, but at one point it occurred to me that missionaries moving westward might also have gotten better at transcription?)

When I was into The Expanse's Lang Belta (a creole), I was following BBC Pidgin: https://www.bbc.com/pidgin to get some feel for the possible antecedents. (UK:"Most read" = Pidgin:"De one we dem de read well well") Just to complicate things, what gets called "Hawai'ian Pidgin" is actually a creole as well, eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R15IQAVT7Rg (Is the use of "Aunty" parallel between this and Oz cultures?)

I'm just a fan. Thanks very much for the pointers into a new set of cultures* for me; up until now I've been enjoying cultural appropriations (consider the platypus!) in the other direction, eg polka acca dacca: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_gtGfAail4 (and songlines I only discovered today while trying to figure out what the Oz equivalent of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuksuk might be)

* so far these mobs have been using a basketball court as an impromptu community centre/dance floor, which I guess they share even with very highly produced numbers, like "Baby One More Time"? As basketball had yet to be invented, earlier germans contented themselves with dancing around lime trees: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanzlinde


> pointers into a new set of cultures

Indigenous Hip Hop Projects have a youtube channel with community made videos from all over the country, eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmKxmxk6Gas , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFIOC078g6E - many in English | mixed, some in local languages. There are also channels such as https://www.youtube.com/@SkinnyfishTV/videos et al.

polka acca dacca covers songs by scots | brits adrift in the colony but the cultural appropriation doesn't stop there! (There are AccaDacca covers from across the globe) Yolŋu bands have covered AC|DC's Jailbreak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaaxbNX-wg8 with a throw to aboriginal deaths in custody and another to the first indigenous language song that charted in AU: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubxZsfyEwWY .. George live was something else: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3RAPV7p-nc




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