[3] Analysis of the grammar of Kayardild revealed that it provided an empirical challenge to a theorem regarding putative linguistic universals in natural languages.
Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom asserted that "no language uses noun affixes to express tense",[4] a claim that reflected a tradition in Western thought going back to Aristotle.
Unlike many other northern Aboriginal groups, particularly those of Arnhem Land, they appear to have had little contact with Southern Asian island traders such as the Makassans, something attested by the lack of loanwords from the Malay, Buginese and Makassarese languages, though some early records indicate tamarind and teak had been harvested by visitors who had axes, and earthenware pots have been uncovered.
[citation needed] Sometime around 1916, a man remembered only as McKenzie came to Bentinck Island and set up a sheep run, basing himself on a site at the mouth of the Kurumnbali estuary.
After a cyclonic tidal surge swept the area in 1948, which followed fast on the severe drought that struck in 1946, the Kaiadilt were transferred by missionaries and the Queensland Government[13] to Mornington Island.
In The Lardil Peoples v State of Queensland [2004] FCA 298, the Federal Court accorded the owners rights to five nautical miles seaward.
The division of labour meant women gathered on the littoral such foods as small rock oysters (tjilangind), mud cockles (kulpanda) and crabs, while the men, when not harvesting the catch from rock fish traps (ngurruwarra), which are found one every .9 kilometres around Bentinck's coastline,[18] but also along the shores of Sweers islands's calcareous peneplain, foraged more broadly for sharks, turtle and dugong.
[1] After the monsoonal rains, the rich silt flow from Queensland rivers into the Gulf lowered salinity allowing marine grasses on which the latter browsed to thrive.
[19] Their mythology evokes a mysterious being whose name means "he who walks behind" led the Kaiadilt to discover water, at Berumoi, by the northerly tip of Bentinck island.