AustLit

'Ephraim began the linguistics part of his career with his collaboration with Terry Klokeid in 1970. This resulted in a series of papers in a volume co-edited by Bani and Klokeid (1971; Bani 1971a–d; Bani & Paipai 1971), which comprised the first linguistically informed descriptive treatment of Western Torres Strait Island Language (Kala Lagaw Ya), and the first treatment of an indigenous language of Australia by a native speaker, involving the creation of terms in Kala Lagaw Ya for the concepts involved in grammatical analysis. Ephraim continued this work with a paper for the 1974 conference of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (Bani 1976); other papers resulting from his collaboration with Klokeid appeared in 1977, 1979, and 1981. Later in 1974, Ephraim enrolled as a student (later a teacher) at the nascent School of Australian Linguistics in Darwin (later Batchelor). At that time he developed the beginnings of his analyses of grammatical gender and of adverbials of space in Kala Lagaw Ya. These were published later as ‘Garka a ipika’ (1987) and ‘The morphodirectional sphere’ (2001). The former was the first, and is to date the only, treatment of grammar and semantics of an indigenous Australian language written in that language and published in a refereed journal.' (Introduction)