52-618: Damin ( Demiin in the practical orthography of Lardil ) was a ceremonial language register used by the advanced initiated men of the aboriginal Lardil ( Leerdil in the practical orthography) and Yangkaal peoples of northern Australia. Both inhabit islands in the Gulf of Carpentaria , the Lardil on Mornington Island , the largest island of the Wesley Group, and the Yangkaal on
104-425: A Sequential Imperative ending. Negation is semantically straightforward, but is expressed with a complex set of affixes; which is used depends on other properties of the verb. Other processes, which may be characterized as derivational rather than inflectional , express duration/repetition, passivity/ reflexivity , reciprocality, and causativity on the verb. Likewise, nouns may be derived from verbs by adding
156-458: A double closure similar to that of the lingual ingressive sounds known as clicks , but with airflow in the opposite direction. With the velum closed, the speaker forces air out of the mouth using either the tongue or cheeks, as in the French expression of dismissal. While not known to be used for normal vocabulary in any human language, apart from the extinct Australian ritual language Damin ,
208-529: A number of i-final stems such as wan̪t̪alŋi 'a species of fish'. Back-vowel apocope also has lexically-governed exceptions. Cluster reduction simplifies underlying word-final consonant clusters, as in *makark > makar 'anthill'. This process is "fed" in a sense by apocope, since some forms that would otherwise end in a short vowel arise as cluster-final after apocope (e.g. *jukarpa > *jukarp > jukar 'husband'). Non-apical truncation results in forms like ŋalu from underlying *ŋaluk , in which
260-413: A signed language employed by first-order male initiates". The Lardil had two initiation ceremonies for men, namely luruku , which involved circumcision , and warama , which involved penile subincision . There were no ceremonies for women, although women did play an important role in these ceremonies, especially in the luruku ceremony. It is sometimes said that Damin was a secret language, but this
312-611: A single root, there are certain to be accidental gaps in this list. /a/ is much less common than /i/ or /u/ , the opposite situation from Lardil. Damin had a much more restricted and generic lexicon than everyday language. With only about 150 lexical roots, each word in Damin stood for several words of Lardil or Yangkaal. It had only two pronouns ( n!a "me" (ego) and n!u "not me" (alter)), for example, compared to Lardil's nineteen, and had an antonymic prefix kuri- ( jijuu "small", kurijijuu "large"). Grammatically,
364-530: A syllable coda. The attested stem medial Damin clusters are rrd, rrth, rrk, rrb, jb , though j of jb is supposedly not allowed in that position. Other clusters, such as nasal–stop, are produced by Lardil grammatical suffixes. Hale & Nash posit that Damin syllables (not counting codas) may only be CVV or CCV. Purported CV syllables are restricted to C = [kʼ] , [ŋ̊] , [ɬ↓ʔ] , suggesting that these are underlyingly iterated consonants. Hale suggests they might be k2, ng2, l2 /kk, ŋŋ, ll/ (rather as [ɕ]
416-403: Is a realization of j2 /t̠ʲt̠ʲ/ ) and also that thrr [t̻ɾ] might be d2 /t̺t̺/ . (Note that transcription of vowel length is inconsistent, and the vocabulary given above does not follow these patterns.) No consonant occurs before all three vowels. Known sequences are as follows. Note however that with only 150 roots in Damin, and several consonants and consonant clusters attested from only
468-481: Is an ingressive sound , in which the airstream flows inward through the mouth or nose. Pulmonic egressive sounds are those in which the air stream is created by the lungs , ribs , and diaphragm . The majority of sounds in most languages, such as /b/ , are both pulmonic and egressive. Pulmonic egressive sounds are found in all spoken languages. Glottalic egressive sounds are known as ejectives . The lingual egressive, also known as velaric egressive , involves
520-420: Is an important feature of many Australian languages; minimal pairs in Lardil with a vowel length distinction include waaka/waka 'crow'/'armpit' and thaldi/thaldii 'come here!’/'to stand up'. Long vowels are roughly twice as long as their short counterparts. Some sources describe /e eː/ as low vowels, closer to /æ æː/. Primary word stress in Lardil falls on the initial syllable, and primary phrase stress on
572-612: Is formed by lengthening the final vowel in instances of vowel-final base forms such as barnga 'stone' (LOC barngaa ). While the Locative case can denote a variety of locative relations (such as those expressed in English by at, on, in, along, etc.), such relations may be specified using inherently locative nominals (e.g. minda 'near', nyirriri 'under') that do not themselves inflect for this case. Nominals corresponding to animate beings tend not to be marked with Locative case; Genitive
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#1732772908290624-519: Is going to go hunting. Some vocabulary: Antonymic derivation with kurri- : Specific reference requires paraphrasing. For example, a sandpiper is called a 'person-burning creature' ( ngaajpu wiiwi-n wuujpu 'human burn- NOM animal') in reference to its role as a character in the Rainbow Serpent Story, while a wooden axe is 'wood that (negatively) affects honey' ( m!iwu didi-i-n wiijpu 'honey affect- PASS-NOM wood') There
676-405: Is its verbs , which may be subclassified as intransitive , transitive , and intransitive- and transitive complemented . Verbs are both semantically and (as discussed below), morphologically distinct from nominals . Nominals are a semantically and functionally diverse group of inflected items in Lardil. Some of them are 'canonical nouns' which refer to items, people or concepts; but many,
728-486: Is likely that /ŋ/ is not a click because a velar click in the straightforward sense is not possible. Damin consonant clusters at the beginning of a word are p'ny [ʘ↑n̠ʲ] , p'ng [ʘ↑ŋ] , fny [ɸn̠ʲ] , fng [ɸŋ] , fy [ɸj] , prpry [ʙ\ʙj] , thrr [t̻ɾ] . Words in normal Lardil may not begin with a cluster. However, Lardil has several clusters in the middle of words, and many of these are not found in Damin words, as Damin only allows n [n̺] and rr [ɾ] in
780-405: Is marked for futurity by a suffix (-kur ~ -ur ~ -r), as in the sentence below: Ngada 1SG ( NOM ) bulethur catch+ FUT yakur. fish+ FUT Ngada bulethur yakur. 1SG(NOM) catch+FUT fish+FUT 'I will catch a fish.' The future marker also has four other functions. It marks: The instrumental case inflection is homophonous with the future marker, but both may appear on
832-498: Is misleading since there was no attempt to prevent the uninitiated members of the Leerdil tribe from overhearing it. However it was taught during the warama ceremony and, therefore, in isolation from the uninitiated. At least one elder is known, who, though not having been subincised, had an excellent command of Damin, but this seems to have been a unique case. Damin lexical words were organised into semantic fields and shouted out to
884-476: Is not mutually intelligible with either of these, it is likely that many Lardil speakers were historically bilingual in Yangkaal (a close relative of Kayardild), since the Lardil people have long been in contact with the neighboring Yangkaal tribe and trading, marriage and conflict between them seem to have been common. There was also limited contact with mainland tribes including the Yanyuwa , of Borroloola ; and
936-408: Is preferred for such constructions as yarramangan 'on the horse' (lit. 'of the horse'). On pronouns, for which case-marking is irregular, Locative case is realized via 'double-expression' of Genitive case: ngada 'I' > ngithun 'I(gen) = my' > ngithunngan 'I(gen)+gen = on me'. The genitive morpheme (-kan ~ -ngan) marks The object of a verb in future tense (either negative or affirmative)
988-474: Is some suggestion of internal morphology or compounding, as suggested by the patterns in the word list above. For example, m!iwu '(native) beehive, honey' and wum!i 'sp. mud crab' may derive from m!ii 'food' and wuu 'mud shell clam'. Lardil language Lardil , also spelled Leerdil or Leertil , is a moribund language spoken by the Lardil people on Mornington Island (Kunhanha), in
1040-515: Is used with sentence subjects and objects of simple imperatives (such as yarraman 'horse' in Kurri yarraman ‘(You) Look at the horse.') is not explicitly marked; uninflected nouns carry nominative case by default. The objective case (-n ~ -in) has five general functions, marking: The locative marker (-nge ~ -e ~ -Vː) appears on the locative complement of a verb in plain form. The objective case serves this purpose with negative verbs. Locative case
1092-531: The Garawa and Wanyi, which groups ranged as far east as Burketown . Members of the Kaiadilt tribe (i.e. speakers of Kayardild) also settled on nearby Bentinck Island in 1947. The number of Lardil speakers has diminished dramatically since Kenneth Hale 's study of the language in the late 1960s. Hale worked with a few dozen speakers of Lardil, some of these fluent older speakers, and others younger members of
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#17327729082901144-651: The Wellesley Islands of Queensland in northern Australia. Lardil is unusual among Aboriginal Australian languages in that it features a ceremonial register , called Damin (also Demiin). Damin is regarded by Lardil-speakers as a separate language and has the only phonological system outside Africa to use click consonants . Lardil is a member of the Tangkic family of Non-Pama–Nyungan Australian languages , along with Kayardild and Yukulta , which are close enough to be mutually intelligible. Though Lardil
1196-400: The digraphs 'nh' and 'ly' are not common in Lardil, but speakers perceive them as distinct, respectively, from /n/ and /l/ , and they do occur in some words (e.g. minhal 'burnt ground', balyarriny [title of a social subsection]). Lardil has eight phonemically distinct vowels, differentiated by short and long variants at each of four places of articulation . Phonemic vowel length
1248-653: The " Stolen Generation ". A dictionary and grammatical sketch of the language were compiled and published by the Mornington Shire Council in 1997, and the Mornington Island State School has implemented a government-funded cultural education program incorporating the Lardil language. The last fluent speaker of so-called Old Lardil died in 2007, though a few speakers of a grammatically distinct New variety remain. Lardil has an intensely complex system of kinship terms reflecting
1300-415: The 1950s, so nowadays Damin is no longer in use by either the Yangkaal or the Lardil. However, recently a revival of cultural traditions has begun, and luruku has been celebrated. It remains to be seen whether warama ceremonies will also be reactivated. Damin words had three of Lardil 's four pairs of vowels, [a, aː, i, iː, u, uː] ; the fourth, [ə, əː] , occurred in grammatical suffixes. Vowel length
1352-411: The 1990s suggests that marlda kangka classifies animals somewhat differently from Lardil, having, for example, a class containing all shellfish (which Lardil lacks) and lacking an inclusive sign for 'dugong+turtle' (Lardil dilmirrur ). In addition to its use by luruku initiates, marlda kangka had practical applications in hunting and warfare. While marlda kangka was essentially a male language,
1404-875: The Damin registers of the Lardil and Yangkaal use all the grammatical morphology of those languages, and so therefore are broadly similar, though it does not employ the phonologically conditioned alternations of that morphology. Damin is spoken by replacing the lexical roots of ordinary Lardil with Damin words. Apart from a leveling of grammatical allomorphs, the grammar remains the same. Ordinary Lardil: Damin: ngithun n!aa my dunji-kan n!2a-kan wife's.younger.brother- GEN ngawa nh!2u dog waang-kur tiitith-ur go- FUT werneng-kiyath-ur. m!ii-ngkiyath-ur. food-go- FUT { Ordinary Lardil: } ngithun dunji-kan ngawa waang-kur werneng-kiyath-ur. Damin: n!aa n!2a-kan nh!2u tiitith-ur m!ii-ngkiyath-ur. {} my wife's.younger.brother-GEN dog go-FUT food-go-FUT My brother-in-law's dog
1456-614: The Forsyth Islands. Their languages belong to the same family , the Tangkic languages . Lardil is the most divergent of the Tangkic languages, while the others are mutually comprehensible with Yangkaal. The Lardil word Demiin can be translated as being silent . The origin of Damin is unclear. The Lardil and the Yangkaal say that Damin was created by a mythological figure in Dreamtime . Hale and colleagues believe that it
1508-409: The action described in the main clause. The evitative ending, which appears as -nymerra in objective ( oblique ) case, marks a verb whose event or process is undesirable or to be avoided, as in niya merrinymerr 'He might hear' (and we don't want him to); it is somewhat analogous to English 'lest', though more productive. When one imperative follows another closely, the second verb is marked with
1560-479: The centrality of kin-relations to Lardil society; all members of the community are addressed by the terms as well as by given names. This system also features a few dyadic kinship terms , i.e. titles for pairs rather than individuals, such as kangkariwarr 'pair of people, one of whom is the paternal great uncle/aunt or grandparent of the other'. Traditionally, the Lardil community held two initiation ceremonies for young men. Luruku , which involved circumcision,
1612-466: The community who had only a working or passive understanding. When Norvin Richards, a student of Hale's, returned to Mornington Island to continue work on Lardil in the 1990s, he found Lardil children had no understanding of the language and that only a handful of aging speakers remained; Richards has stated that "Lardil was deliberately destroyed" by assimilation and relocation programs in the years of
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1664-466: The dead, such as circumlocution via kinship terms. The consonant inventory is as follows, with the practical orthography in parentheses. Lardil's consonant inventory is fairly typical with respect to Australian phonology; it does not distinguish between voiced and unvoiced stops (such as b/p and g/k), and features a full set of stops and nasals at six places of articulation . The distinction between 'apical' and 'laminal' consonants lies in whether
1716-496: The end of bimoraic forms, as in *penki > penke 'lagoon'. In several historical locative/ergatives, lowering does not occur. It does occur in at least one long, u-final stem, and it coexists with the raising of certain stem-final /a/s. In some trimoraic (or longer) forms, final, underlying short vowels undergo apocope (deletion), as in *jalulu > jalul 'fire'. Front-vowel apocope fails to occur in locatives , verbal negatives, many historical locative/ ergatives , and
1768-593: The final word in the phrase. These stress rules have some exceptions, notably compounds containing tangka 'man' as a head noun modified by a demonstrative or another nominal; these expressions, and other compound phrases, have phrase-initial stress. In addition to the common phonological alterations noted above, Lardil features some complex word-final phonology which is affected by both morphological and lexical factors. Augmentation acts on many monomoraic forms, producing, for example, /ʈera/ 'thigh' from underlying *ter . High vowels tend to undergo lowering at
1820-439: The initiate in a single session. As each word was announced, a second speaker gave its Lardil equivalent. However, it normally took several sessions before a novice mastered the basics and could use Damin openly in the community. One speaker did claim to have learned to speak Damin in a single session, but on the other hand two senior warama men admitted that they lacked a firm command of the register. Once Damin had been learned,
1872-409: The language has proved controversial, since the Lardil community regards it as cultural property and no explicit permission was given to make Damin words public. Death in Lardil tends to be treated euphemistically; it is common, for example, to use the phrase wurdal yarburr 'meat' when referring to a deceased person (or corpse). Yuur-kirnee yarburr (literally, 'The meat/animal has died') has
1924-424: The non-initiated were not forbidden to speak it. Damin, on the other hand, was (at least nominally) a secret language spoken only by warama initiates and those preparing for second initiation, though many community members seem to have understood it. Damin, like marlda kangka , was phonologically, lexically and semantically distinct from Lardil, though its syntax and morphology seem to be analogous. Research into
1976-419: The particle mara , either the proposed outcome of a hypothetical (If you had done X, I would have Y’ed) or an unachieved intention; it also marks embedded verbs in jussive clauses. The (marked) non-future is used primarily in dependent clauses to indicate a temporal limit to an action. The contemporaneous ending marks a verb in a subordinate clause when that verb's referent action is contemporaneous with
2028-449: The possible exception of the clicks. However, Hale notes that the Damin alveolar and retroflex clicks (found in the pronouns n!aa , n!uu and in rn!aa , rn!ii respectively) might be in complementary distribution, and it is not clear that they are distinct sounds. Some of the consonants listed above only occur in clusters. /n̺/ only occurs as a coda. A derivational rule seems to be to pronounce all onset nasals as clicks; it
2080-440: The process responsible for some of these forms is better described as laminalization (i.e. nawit is underlying and nawic occurs in inflected forms), but apicalization explains the variation between alveolar /t/ and dental /t̪/ (contrastive but both apical) in surface forms with an underlying non-apical, and does not predict/generate as many invalid forms as does the laminalization model. The first major lexical class in Lardil
2132-509: The pulmonic egressive consonants are exotic for the Australian context: fricatives, voiceless nasals, and bilabial trills. The consonants of Damin, in the practical orthography and IPA equivalents, were: § These sounds are found in standard Lardil, but not in Damin, apart from grammatical words and suffixes. L* is described as "ingressive with egressive glottalic release". There is no alveolar–retroflex distinction in Damin, with
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2184-422: The same nominal in certain instances. Lingual egressive In human speech, egressive sounds are sounds in which the air stream is created by pushing air out through the mouth or nose. The three types of egressive sounds are pulmonic egressive (from the lungs ), glottalic egressive (from the glottis ), and lingual ( velaric ) egressive (from the tongue ). The opposite of an egressive sound
2236-522: The sense 'You-know-who has died', and is preferable to a more direct treatment. It is taboo to speak the name of a deceased person, even (for a year or so) when referring to living people with the same name; these people are addressed as thamarrka . The deceased is often known by the name of his/her death or burial place plus the necronym suffix -ngalin , as in Wurdungalin 'one who died at Wurdu'. Sometimes other strategies are used to refer to
2288-401: The speakers were known as Demiinkurlda ("Damin possessors"). They spoke the register particularly in ritual contexts, but also in everyday secular life, when foraging, sitting about gossiping, and the like. The cultural traditions of the Lardil and Yangkaal have been in decline for several decades, and the Lardil and Yangkaal languages are nearly extinct. The last warama ceremony was held in
2340-438: The stative or attributive nominals, are semantically more like adjectives or other predicates. Kurndakurn 'dry', durde 'weak', and other lexical items with adjectival meanings inflect exactly like other nominals. Determiners (e.g. nganikin 'that', baldu(u)rr 'that (distant) west' ), are also morphological nominals, as are inherently temporal and spatial adverbs (e.g. dilanthaarr 'long ago', bada 'in
2392-421: The suffix ( -n ~ -Vn ), as in werne-kebe-n 'food-gatherer' or werne-la-an 'food-spearer'; the negative counterpart of this is ( -jarr ), as in dangka-be-jarr (man+bite+neg) 'non-biter-of-people'. Lardil nominals are inflected for objective, locative and genitive cases, as well as future and non-future; these are expressed via endings that attach to the base forms of nominals. The nominative case, which
2444-434: The tip (apex) of the tongue or its flattened blade makes contact with the place of articulation. Hale's 1997 practical orthography has 'k' for /k ~ ɡ/ in order to disambiguate nasal+velar clusters (as in wanka 'arm' ) from instances of the velar nasal phoneme /ŋ/ (as in wangal ‘ boomerang ’ ) and to avoid suggesting /ɡ/ - gemination in /ŋ + k~ɡ/ clusters (as in ngangkirr 'together' ). The sounds represented by
2496-486: The underlying form would end in a non-apical consonant (i.e. one not produced with the tip of the tongue). This process is also fed by apocope, and seems to be lexically governed to an extent, since Lardil words can end in a laminal; compare kakawuɲ 'a species of bird', kulkic 'a species of shark'. In addition to the dropping of non-apicals, a process of apicalization is at work, giving forms such as ŋawit from underlying laminal-final *ŋawic . It has been proposed that
2548-677: The west' ). Lardil has a rich pronominal system featuring an inclusive-exclusive plurality distinction, a dual number and generational harmony. A 'harmonic' relationship exists between individuals of alternate generations (e.g. grandparent/grandchild); a 'disharmonic' relation is between individuals of consecutive or odd-numbered generations (e.g. parent/child, great-grandparent/great-grandchild). Uninflected elements in Lardil include: Nine basic inflectional endings appear on verbs in Lardil: The future marker ( -thur ) indicates anticipation/expectation of an event, or, when combined with
2600-571: Was invented by Lardil elders; it has several aspects found in language games around the world, such as turning nasal occlusives such as m and n into nasal clicks , doubling consonants, and the like. Evans and colleagues, after studying the mythology of both tribes, speculate that it was the Yangkaal elders who invented Damin and passed it to the Lardil. According to Fleming (2017), "the eccentric features of Damin developed in an emergent and unplanned manner in which conventionalized paralinguistic phonations became semanticized as they were linked up with
2652-447: Was not contrastive, but depended on the preceding consonant. Damin was the only click language outside Africa . Damin used only some of the ( pulmonic ) consonants of everyday Lardil, but they were augmented by four other airstream mechanisms : lingual ingressive (the nasal clicks), glottalic egressive (a velar ejective), pulmonic ingressive (an indrawn lateral fricative), and lingual egressive (a bilabial 'spurt'). Even some of
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#17327729082902704-416: Was undergone by all men following the appearance of facial hair; warama , the second initiation, was purely voluntary and culminated in a subincision ceremony. Luruku initiates took a year-long oath of silence and were taught a sign language known as marlda kangka (literally, 'hand language'), which, though limited in its semantic scope, was fairly complex. Anthropologist David McKnight's research in
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