6. OCCURRENCES PANELS

Below the Elaboration bars are the two Occurrences Panels. These are the biggest panels on the Overview screen.

Among the more than 9000 records in the ALLSYD database is the following example.

"[Gwíüng boalá]"

buwa-la =

"[The fire is out, or]"

blow IMP! :

Dawes (b) [b:31:13.11] [BB]

The words the occurrence panels relate to have been enlarged here

This is the record that brings up the results shown in the two examples below.

NoH OCCURRENCES: ‘buwa’

First, the panel at the upper left concentrates on the NoH (tawny) column. It displays all entries in the database concerned (here, the ALLSYD database) for ‘buwa’:

Fig. 6.1 All the ALLSYD database occurrences of the NoH entry ‘buwa’ are displayed

A glance at the JSM column in this display reveals that ‘buwa’ is to do with blowing, wind, breath. But Dawes has given the translation that the fire (gwiyang) was ‘out’ (extinguished, dead, not lit). But was he right? These occurrence panels help in making such assessments.

JSM OCCURRENCES: ‘blow’

The EngJSM Occurrences panel concentrates on the yellow column, in which every entry necessarily is for ‘blow’, for it is precisely this word that the panel seeks to find:

Fig. 6.2 All the ALLSYD database occurrences of the JSM entry ‘blow’ are displayed

Among the entries in the database for the word ‘blow’, some are ‘buwa’, and all begin with ‘bu’.

What the panels appear to suggest is that the sentence ‘gwiyang buwa-la’ did NOT mean that the fire was out, but that it was a command: ‘fire, blow it!’, an instruction to Dawes to blow on it to make it burn, and revive it from its nearly ‘out’ condition.

So this sentence chosen as an example of the operation of the ‘Occurrences’ panels illustrates how the panels can help when looking at particular words, whether in NoH form for the Indigenous word, or in the JSM form of the simplified English translation.