Wind direction words in the sydney language: A case study in semantic reconstitution

The wind direction terms in the Sydney Language differ in the various sources (from the First Fleeters onwards), and at first sight look confused. After some sifting it emerges that the early sources fall into two sets partly relatable by a quarter-turn in the terms for the four cardinal directions. There are also terms for intermediate directions and probably sea and land breezes, and terms relatable to the sun and tides. A recent treatment of the wind direction data by Gibson, who draws as well on work by Troy, interprets the records as indicating that some word meanings shift so much according to context that he questions whether the Sydney Language had words at all. However, there is order discernible here, fitting with regional evidence for the salience of cardinal directions. The main four directions may have been aligned to axes offset from the cardinal directions, or else participate in a kind of location-dependent quarter-turn rotation. I conclude with brief remarks on the methods for detecting order in patchy historical data, and on the public communication of linguistic findings.