Barry John Blake (born 1937) is an Australian linguist, specialising in the description of

Australian Aboriginal languages The Indigenous languages of Australia number in the hundreds, the precise number being quite uncertain, although there is a range of estimates from a minimum of around 250 (using the technical definition of 'language' as non-mutually intellig ...

. He is a

professor emeritus ''Emeritus'' (; female: ''emerita'') is an adjective used to designate a retired chair, professor, pastor, bishop, pope, director, president, prime minister, rabbi, emperor, or other person who has been "permitted to retain as an honorary title ...

La Trobe University La Trobe University is a public research university based in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Its main campus is located in the suburb of Bundoora. The university was established in 1964, becoming the third university in the state of Victoria an ...

Melbourne.

Career

Blake was born in the northern Melbourne suburb of

Ascot Vale Ascot Vale is an inner-city suburb in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, north-west of Melbourne's Central Business District, located within the City of Moonee Valley local government area. Ascot Vale recorded a population of 15,197 at the 2021 c ...

. His father was an accomplished speaker of

rhyming slang Rhyming slang is a form of slang word construction in the English language. It is especially prevalent among Cockneys in England, and was first used in the early 19th century in the East End of London; hence its alternative name, Cockney rhymin ...

, and Blake was raised listening to talks in which a priest would be called 'cream and yeast', nuns 'currant buns' and being drunk ('pissed') 'Brahms and Liszt'. After graduating from

Melbourne University The University of Melbourne is a public research university located in Melbourne, Australia. Founded in 1853, it is Australia's second oldest university and the oldest in Victoria. Its main campus is located in Parkville, an inner suburb nor ...

with an honours degree in Latin and English, he worked as a secondary schoolteacher before joining the

Australian Department of Defence Australian(s) may refer to: Australia * Australia, a country * Australians, citizens of the Commonwealth of Australia ** European Australians ** Anglo-Celtic Australians, Australians descended principally from British colonists ** Aboriginal Aus ...

where he worked as a language instructor. In 1966, he became a research fellow at the

Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), established as the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (AIAS) in 1964, is an independent Australian Government statutory authority. It is a collecting, ...

Monash University Monash University () is a public research university based in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Named for prominent World War I general Sir John Monash, it was founded in 1958 and is the second oldest university in the state. The university has a ...

and began to undertake field research and analysis of three moribund three indigenous languages,

Kalkatungu The Kalkadoon (properly Kalkatungu) are descendants of an Indigenous Australian tribe living in the Mount Isa region of Queensland. Their forefather tribe has been called "the elite of the Aboriginal warriors of Queensland". In 1884 they were ma ...

, once spoken around

Mount Isa Mount Isa ( ) is a city in the Gulf Country region of Queensland, Australia. It came into existence because of the vast mineral deposits found in the area. Mount Isa Mines (MIM) is one of the most productive single mines in world history, bas ...

in central Queensland and which was the basis for his M.A.thesis (1968),

Pitta Pitta The Pitapita or Pitta Pitta are an Aboriginal Australian people of the state of Queensland. Language They spoke Pitta Pitta language, Pitapita, one of the Karnic languages, which remains the best described dialect of an eastern group that compri ...

and

Yalarnnga The Yalarnnga, also known as the Jalanga, are an Indigenous Australian people of the state of Queensland. Language Yalarnnga is an extinct Australian Aboriginal language, hypothesized to be one of the two Galgadungic languages of the Pama–Ny ...

. He obtained his PhD at Monash in 1975. He was elected fellow of the

Australian Academy of the Humanities The Australian Academy of the Humanities was established by Royal Charter in 1969 to advance scholarship and public interest in the humanities in Australia. It operates as an independent not-for-profit organisation partly funded by the Australia ...

in 1987, and in the following year was appointed to the Foundation Chair in linguistics at La Trobe University. He has recently reconstructed aspects of the extinct dialects of the

Kulin languages The Kulin languages are a group of closely related languages of the Kulin people, part of the ''Kulinic'' branch of Pama–Nyungan. Languages *Woiwurrung (Woy-wur-rung): spoken from Mount Baw Baw in the east to Mount Macedon, Sunbury and Gisb ...

from fragmentary evidence retrieved from various ethnographic reports made in the 19th century.

Theoretical work

Blake's theoretical work has made a decisive contribution to the long-standing debate over whether the observed distinction between the Pama-Nyungan languages and

non-Pama-Nyungan languages The Indigenous languages of Australia number in the hundreds, the precise number being quite uncertain, although there is a range of estimates from a minimum of around 250 (using the technical definition of 'language' as non-mutually intellig ...

of Australia was genetic or typological. Robert M. W. Dixon had reconstructed the elements of the proto-Australian pronoun system, and Blake did similar work for the non-Pama-Nyungan languages, showing that their verb pronominal prefix forms may well have descended from a single proto-language, with a distinct set of proto-pronouns, the implication being that there were two distinct proto-languages in the Australian continent. His linguistic interests have extended beyond Australia, in work on south East Asian languages where he has shown that the phenomenon of ergativity is much more widespread than had previously been thought. He has done pioneering studies in the field of

linguistic typology Linguistic typology (or language typology) is a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features to allow their comparison. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity and the co ...

and case-marking systems. For example, he developed the hierarchy of cases.

Selected works

* (1981) with Graham Mallinson, ''Language Typology:Cross-linguistic Studies in Syntax.'' North-Holland Publishing 978-0-444-86311-9 * (1987) ''Australian Aboriginal Grammar,''

Croom Helm Routledge () is a British multinational publisher. It was founded in 1836 by George Routledge, and specialises in providing academic books, journals and online resources in the fields of the humanities, behavioural science, education, law, and ...

* (1994) ''Case.'' Cambridge University Press (reprint 2001) * (2010) ''Secret Language.''

Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books ...

* (2003) * (2007) ''Playing with Words: Humour in the English Language.''Equinox Publishing

Notes and references

Notes

References

* * * * * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Blake, Barry 1937 births Linguists from Australia Linguists of Australian Aboriginal languages Linguists of Pama–Nyungan languages Living people Fellows of the Australian Academy of the Humanities