Rations: Flour, sugar, tea and tobacco in Australian languages

Abstract

This paper is a lexical study of rations–flour, sugar, tea and tobacco–in Australian languages. The distribution of food played an important role in relations between Aboriginal people and colonizers: this study complements existing historical and ethnographic work on the topic by investigating the lexicon of rations in a set of 197 languages across Australia. We discern a number of patterns. There are relatively few extensions of terms for traditional equivalents in the case of ‘flour’, ‘sugar’ and ‘tea’, for a number of reasons, while ‘tobacco’ shows more such extensions. Extensions based on other terms highlight semantic features like texture for flour and sugar, shape of the main ingredient for tea, and smoking as the new mode of consumption for tobacco. Other minor patterns highlight colour, processing and flavour. There is also some areal patterning in the data, some related to borrowing, from Austronesian languages as well as internally, and others based on semantic structure.