In the British Isles, the glottal stop was once used in writing clan-names - M'Allan, M'Leary, and similar. At different times in different places, it came to be substituted by the -k- sound, which produced the surnames Callan and Cleary. Where it was kept, in some places - Ireland, specifically - M'Leary/McLeary became O'Leary - phonetically Och-Leary, not Oh-Leary. A great many English names that begin with the letter C- and G- trace their origins to the glottal-stop. In other dialects, letters P/b/v and m/ begin surnames that used to be glottal stops. We have many examples of differentiations between the P/Q-Celtic and C/K-Celtic words. The stop's use in past times is grossly under-appreciated today, especially among students of personal names and place-names. Near the borders of the dialects, we have names such as Marlow and Barlow (just for instance) living more or less side by side.

Back to the re-naming of Fraser Island in Australia to K'gari... I automatically pronounce it Kuh-gary, but maybe it should be Kuck-gary, to give the apostrophe it's full value of "ck".

Perhaps doing a little research would assist your understanding, not only of how K'gari is pronounced, but also of the history of First Nations peoples in Australia. I find it astounding that you appear to be offended by the place names given by colonisers in relatively recent history being replaced by the traditional names passed down through thousands of years of oral history.

I'm not offended; I just find it silly and unnecessary. The thing about oral history is that it can be neither proved nor disproved. Had every aboriginal clan or tribe lived for thousands of years in the exact places they were found when the European invaders arrived? I doubt it; you don't doubt it. That's life. But there are several clans today that claim to have once lived somewhere else. Are they lying? Did inter-tribal war never raise its ugly head, in those thousands of years? What about the pygmies who were there in North Queensland when the Europeans arrived. Who killed them off? They have been largely written out of the history of settlements in Australia, which seems a bit suspicious.

Spouse: I have no dog in this fight. I emigrated from Oz sixty years ago. I still keep an interest in the country's affairs, but it's not a deep interest. I am a man of logic, and will not accept just on somebody's say-so that any aborigines who were settled in a certain place when the Europeans came and dispossessed them, were the descendants of the line/tribe/clan of aborigines who had lived continuously in that place for thousands of years. It's highly, highly, unlikely that they were the first to live there: rather, the last. A question worth asking is this: What was the place now called K'gari, called before that? Please don't tell me it was called K'gari for thousands of years. I might ask for proof!

I have actually spent a good couple of hours reading an assortment of research papers written by various anthropological people down through many decades. All rather interesting so I shall look to read further.

Equally, I have been pondering a little on how one does produce a written language from a verbal one . Of course much depends on the interpretation of the sounds as they are individually heard at the time of journalling the speech, so I had a little bit of a read up on that also. How language sounds which have little to no basis in existing written forms are interpreted. For example the ancient African click language Xhosa which first came into my little sphere as a youngster with Miriam Makeba .

In the case of K'garri it would seem the K is silent but is there to perhaps harden the sound of the G just as a cedilla in french softens a C. So it would be more about the subtleties of pronunciation and then meaning of an individual word where the sounds may be similar but not mean the same thing. I am unclear about the apostrophe in this at the moment unless it indicates a pause in the sounding of the hardened G . Of course this only relates to the latin alphabet as opposed to other alphabets/scripts.

I don't really care what you will and won't 'accept', and I doubt that anyone else in Australia does either.
Knock yourself out with your White Man's Burden shite, I'm out.

@ spouse of scouse
Neighbours of yours?
How we met: ‘I told him to come to mine, because I’m classy like that’
You must know them




(this is where you say they live across the street)

Thanks for your thoughts about the K' component of the name K'gari. I hadn't thought of it as a glottal stop by and of itself. I haven't yet found any opinion of how the local aboriginal natives pronounced the name. Nor have I found any debate on how many generations the claimed "traditional" community (clan, tribe, or nation if there was such a thing) had actually lived on Fraser/K'gari Island. There wouldn't be much point in everybody today adopting the name K'gari if it were discovered one day that the namers of K'gari had stolen the place from some hitherto unknown predecessors. Over a period of 50,000 years or whatever, it would be pretty much unique in the entire world for there to have been no predecessors of those present in a specific place in 1770.

I am inclined to stick with "Fraser Island", until the champions of "K'gari" show proof that K'gari was the name given to the island by the original settlers. Or at least by settlers dating from significantly earlier than 1770.

Don't stop there, BEVS! I for one know nothing about the Xhosa click language and how it's transformed into Latin script, and I hope you will post some more comments about it. I've always pronounced Xhosa as Kosa, and wondered what the X was doing there. How to deal with foreign words - especially foreign place-names - is a fascinating topic. Among other aspects, how one should react to "pidgin-English" - the catch-all name for a great variety of invented dialects throughout the world.

We're told that the word pidgin began during Britain's earliest trading encounters with Chinese importers in and around Hong Kong. Reportedly, it was the closest the local Chinese could get to the word business. Sounds a bit far-fetched, but that's the longstanding belief; and it's worth tossing onto our barbie. Why not?

When Linda and I lived in the New Hebrides in the 1970s, the local pidgin was the common way of communication between Europeans and natives. Today as the nation of Vanuatu, the islands have it as their official language. Its formal name was then and is now "Bislama", a corruption of the French "beche-de-mer", a local seafood delicacy. France and Britain were the islands' joint colonial masters back then. I've related a few stories about that in my "Back in the Day" thread in the "Rest of the World" forum, if anybody is interested.

And this was written by whom, exactly?

Probably some loony lefty pinko woolly wet bleeding heart liberal sandal wearing vegetarian yogurt knitting virtue signaller.

Exactly. Or a prematurely retired civil servant landlord - seeking glory.

How dare you. I'm not vegetarian.

Surely with this being 'Shrimps on the Barbie', anyone woke would be pescatarian?

Unless the shrimp are not shrimp



Or perhaps shrimps is used in the context of size. Being just a tad over 5' I think I qualify.

Personally, having never liked seafood, shrimp (as in shellfish) are just 🤮

Shrimps are only a problem when they come from Thailand.
Ooh...I just researched that. Apparently it's "okay" now. I can stop checking labels