Ngumbarl (Ngombaru, Ngormbal) is an extinct, poorly-attested Nyulnyulan language formerly spoken in

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, north of the town of Broome along the coast, by the Ngumbarl people.

Documentation

The language was previously thought to be unattested. Although Daisy Bates had recorded data, comprising a wordlist and a few sentences, in the early twentieth century with Ngumbarl/ Jukun informant Billingee, it had previously been thought the data were only for Jukun. The list contains about 800 words, but the

orthography An orthography is a set of convention (norm), conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, Word#Word boundaries, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and Emphasis (typography), emphasis. Most national ...

is inconsistent and the translations are somewhat unreliable (e.g. is translated "are you hunting kangaroo?" but actually means "you're going to the pindan").

Phonology

It is difficult to infer much about Ngumbarl's phonology, because of the orthography used in its

corpus Corpus (plural ''corpora'') is Latin for "body". It may refer to: Linguistics * Text corpus, in linguistics, a large and structured set of texts * Speech corpus, in linguistics, a large set of speech audio files * Corpus linguistics, a branch of ...

. Claire Bowern reconstructs a tentative sound change of word-final ' in the

proto-language In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unatte ...

to ' (e.g. *yaŋki 'what' to ').

Grammar

The ergative suffix was '; if this evolved from ', it matches the previously mentioned sound change from ' to '. The

locative In grammar, the locative case ( ; abbreviated ) is a grammatical case which indicates a location. In languages using it, the locative case may perform a function which in English would be expressed with such prepositions as "in", "on", "at", and " ...

was ' (compare Proto-Nyulnyuylan's *''-kun''). Very few verbs, and no full

paradigms In science and philosophy, a paradigm ( ) is a distinct set of concepts or thought patterns, including theories, research methods, postulates, and standards for what constitute legitimate contributions to a field. The word ''paradigm'' is Greek ...

, are found in the data, although there are some partial paradigms, e.g.: Eastern Nyulnyuylan languages have experienced a group of changes in its verbal morphology: * Proto-Nyulnyuylan singular

past The past is the set of all Spacetime#Definitions, events that occurred before a given point in time. The past is contrasted with and defined by the present and the future. The concept of the past is derived from the linear fashion in which human ...

intransitive In grammar, an intransitive verb is a verb, aside from an auxiliary verb, whose context does not entail a transitive object. That lack of an object distinguishes intransitive verbs from transitive verbs, which entail one or more objects. Additi ...

 > Eastern Nyulnyuylan

non-past The nonpast tense (also spelled non-past) ( abbreviated ) is a grammatical tense that distinguishes an action as taking place in times present or future. The nonpast tense contrasts with the past tense, which distinguishes an action as taking place ...

 intransitive * PN singular 

present The present is the period of time that is occurring now. The present is contrasted with the past, the period of time that has already occurred; and the future, the period of time that has yet to occur. It is sometimes represented as a hyperplan ...

transitive > EN non-past transitive * PN 

plural In many languages, a plural (sometimes list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated as pl., pl, , or ), is one of the values of the grammatical number, grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than ...

 present (both transitive and intransitive) > EN non-past plural  Ngumbarl's attested forms are consistent with these — assuming the verb forms were given in the same tense.

References

Nyulnyulan languages {{ia-lang-stub