WORLD ATLAS OF POETIC TRADITIONS

MARINGARR

• Affiliation: Western Daly > Maringarr
• Area: Five elderly speakers near Wadeye, Northern Territory, Australia
• ISO 639-3 code: zmt

Introduction

Maringarr is a moribund language formerly spoken in a small community in the Northern Territory of Australia.

For a brief few decades in the twentieth century, before the language rushed on its way to virtual extinction, Maringarr had a thriving tradition of songs called lirrga. Lirrga was one of the four genres of sung poetry used by the local Aboriginal community in circumcision feasts and funerals, and the one specifically associated with speakers of Maringarr; the other genres were wangga, sung by speakers of the Maridjabin language, and djanba and wurltjirri, both sung by Murrinh-Patha speakers. Maringarr singers went to perform lirrga for Maridjabin and Murrinh-Patha communities during their circumcisions and funerals, and the other three genres were performed in place of lirrga during the circumcision or death of a Maringarr.

Maringarr and Maridjabin have only a very few elderly speakers left and will soon die out.

This practice may seem to have the force of tradition behind it, but it was actually short-lived. Lirrga is a modern genre, invented c. 1960 by two men with the English names Brian Nummar (1910—1997) and Tommy Moyle Karui (1925—1997), who were inspired by music from the nearby Gunwinggu people but chose to describe the beauty of Maringarr country in its own language. (The Maringarr describe the two men not as having invented the genre, but as simply having discovered and "picked up" music that was always inherent in the land but simply not perceived.)

Non-lirrga Maringarr songs do not appear to have been studied.

Few songs are attributed to Nummar and Karui; most of the 97 songs that make up the current (and, barring a later revitatlization of the language, definitive) lirrga corpus are the work of the later songwriters Pius Luckan and Clement Tchinburur. Luckan, who denies that he composed the poems and says he received them from mermaids, draws almost entirely from the nature of his country and the spirituality of his people, frequently referencing the three most important figures of Maringarr religion: the mermaid, the sea-eagle, and the owl. Tchinburur's work touches on a wider variety of themes.

Lirrga songs are terse, and translated, they resemble Japanese haiku more than anything.

The musical confines of Maringarr meter

Lirrga is always sung, and its loosely syllable-counting meter is determined by the rhythmic mode of the music.

Lirrga has four rhythmic modes that vary in vocal rhythm and the speed of clapstick beats. The two fast-beat modes, tasri-verri tjitjuk-tjitjuk ("four rough step") and tasri verri pitpit ("quick rough step"), both have a triple vocal rhythm. The two slow-beat modes, titir kindjerryit ("clapsticks drag") and kiyirri ("slow"), differ; the latter also has a triple rhythm, but the former has a quadruple one.

As the slowest mode, kiyirri permits the least number of syllables. Each line of a kiyirri-mode song is partitioned into four three-beat segments by clapsticks and didgeridoos. Each beat corresponds to a syllable, except for the final syllable of each line, which is sung for many beats. The final syllable of the final line is especially long. This means that the content of each line must fit into six or nine beats, corresponding to the three-beat units. This forces a maximally nine-syllable meter on kiyirri compositions, with a tendency for multiples of three. The following song's meter is 9 / 6 / 8:

However, the faster titir kindjerryit mode has a quadruple rhythm. Each of the segments is two-beat and each syllable usually corresponds to a half-beat. Poetry sung to titir kindjerryit is thus twelve lines at maximum (barring the unusually long final line) and has a tendency for twelve-syllable lines, as seen in the following adaptation of "Munimenhmi #1" to the mode by Tchinburrur, with a 12 / 10 / 12+1 meter:

The two fastest modes share a triple rhythm with kiyirri, meaning that kiyirri texts can be adopted without problem and a syllabic meter counting multiples of three or six is often used. However, in the faster modes one syllable can correspond to a half-beat, resulting in a theoretical maximum of eighteen syllables per line and much greater metrical freedom generally, as seen in the following tasri verri pitpit piece with a 12 / 1+12 meter (Altjama is a location in the Maringarr homeland):

In order to meet the meter, the lirrga songwriters used contractions impossible in everyday Maringarr extensively, cutting down large numbers of polysyllabic words to one syllable.

Lirrga songs do not seem to use alliteration or rhyme systematically.

Parallelism and serialization

One very common form of parallelism in lirrga is repetition, both of words and entire lines. There are examples of both processes above.

Forms of parallelism more dependent on Maringarr grammar include reduplication (e.g. the word rarr "roam" is turned into rarrarr "roam and roam"), which is productive in the language but unusually frequent in lirrga, and serialization. Serial verbs are when one clause takes multiple consecutive verbs; this is rare in English but found in expressions such as "Let's go eat". In Maringarr syntax, five movement verbs, such as kani "walk" and kang "stand", can form serial verb expressions to mark aspect or positional information.

Serialization was not very common in spoken Maringarr, but the majority of verbs in the lirrga corpus are serialized. For instance, in the song below translated so that every Maringarr morpheme is visible, the repeating serial kani "to walk; to keep doing" adds resonance to the song:

Bibliography

• "Endangered songs and endangered languages", Allan Marett and Linda Barwick. In Maintaining the Links: Language Identity and the Land, 2003.
• "Marri Ngarr Lirrga Songs: A Linguistic Analysis", Lysbeth Ford. Musicology Australia, 2011.
• "Marri Ngarr Lirrga Songs: A Musicological Analysis of Song Pairs in Performance", Linda Barwick. Musicology Australia, 2011.