[Talk] Mirror or compass? Sleuthing the histories of Macassan words in Northern Australia

Readers may be interested in this webinar by Nicholas Evans on pre-colonial contact between Australia and Indonesia happening on March 25.

Contact with ‘Macassans’ was the most significant contact by Indigenous Australian groups with the ‘outside’ world before the British invasion. Along with influences discernible in the realms of material objects, genes, and cultural practices, they also left extensive and tangible evidence of their presence in the form of ‘loanwords’ – words adopted into the languages of many scores of Indigenous groups from the Gulf of Carpentaria to the Bonaparte Gulf. How to interpret the stories these words can tell us, according to the rigorous principles of historical linguistics, is the subject of this talk.

Source: Meeting Registration – Zoom