Yirram Languages
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Yirram Languages
The Yirram or Jaminjungan languages, also known as ''Western Mirndi'', are a branch of the Mirndi languages spoken around the Victoria River in the Northern Territory of Australia. The name of these languages is derived from the dual clitic In morphology and syntax, a clitic ( , backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a ... which is ''"yirram"'' in each of the languages. It consists of two languages, the Nungali language and the Jaminjung language. A third language has been proposed, Ngaliwurru, but it is often thought to be merely a dialect of the Jaminjung language. References Indigenous Australian languages in the Northern Territory {{ia-lang-stub ...
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Victoria River (Northern Territory)
The Victoria River is a river in the bioregion of Victoria Bonaparte in the Northern Territory of Australia. It flows for from its source south of the Judbarra / Gregory National Park to the Joseph Bonaparte Gulf in the Timor Sea. History On 12 September 1819, Philip Parker King came to the mouth of the Victoria and, twenty years later, in 1839, Captain J. C. Wickham arrived at the same spot in and named the river after Queen Victoria. Crew members of the Beagle followed the river upstream into the interior for more than . In August 1855 Augustus Gregory sailed from Moreton Bay and at the end of September reached the estuary of the Victoria River. He sailed up the river and carried out extensive exploration. In 1847 Edmund Kennedy went on an expedition to trace the route of the "River Victoria" of Thomas Mitchell with a view to finding whether there was a practical route to the Gulf of Carpentaria. This "River Victoria" was later renamed the Barcoo River. Locati ...
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Australia
Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising mainland Australia, the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and list of islands of Australia, numerous smaller islands. It has a total area of , making it the list of countries and dependencies by area, sixth-largest country in the world and the largest in Oceania. Australia is the world's flattest and driest inhabited continent. It is a megadiverse countries, megadiverse country, and its size gives it a wide variety of landscapes and Climate of Australia, climates including deserts of Australia, deserts in the Outback, interior and forests of Australia, tropical rainforests along the Eastern states of Australia, coast. The ancestors of Aboriginal Australians began arriving from south-east Asia 50,000 to 65,000 years ago, during the Last Glacial Period, last glacial period. By the time of British settlement, Aboriginal Australians spoke 250 distinct l ...
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Mirndi Languages
The Mirndi or Mindi languages are an Australian Aboriginal languages, Australian language family spoken in the Northern Territory of Australia. The family consists of two sub-groups and an isolate branch: the Yirram languages, and the Ngurlun languages and Jingulu language some 200 km farther to the southeast, separated by the Ngumpin languages. The primary difference between the two sub-groups is that while the Yirram languages are all prefixing like other non-Pama–Nyungan languages, the Ngurlun languages are all suffixing like most Pama–Nyungan languages. The name of the family is derived from the Dual (grammatical number), dual clusivity, inclusive pronoun ('we', in the sense of 'you and I') which is shared by all the languages in the family in the form of either ''mind-'' or . Classification The family has been generally accepted after being first established by Neil Chadwick in the early 1980s. The genetic relationship is primarily based upon morphology (linguis ...
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Nungali Language
Nungali, or (with a different prefix) Yilngali, is an Australian language which is believed to be extinct. It was spoken in the Northern Territory of Australia, around the upper Daly River. Its closest relative is the Jaminjung language. Grammar Cases It is the only Yirram language which has retained the original four-class system in nominals. The four classes are masculine, feminine, neuter and plants, and each of the classes have separate prefixes expressing the absolutive case, locative or ergative case, and the dative case. The locative case is also productive when it comes to placenames. An example is referring to the Timber Creek area, which consists of the neuter locative prefix , the word for ''"river gum"'', the 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 greate ...
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Jaminjung Language
Jaminjung is a moribund Australian language spoken around the Victoria River in the Northern Territory of Australia. There seems to be a steady increase in the number of speakers of the language with very few people speaking the language in 1967, about 30 speakers in 1991, and between 50 and 150 speakers in 2000. In 1971, Frances Kofod and others published a grammar of the Ngaliwuru language, while in 2011 a book of Jaminjung & Ngaliwuru names and uses of plants & animals was published. Phonology Vowels Jaminjung has 4 vowels: Vowel length is not distinctive. The close-mid vowel /e/ only appears in a small number of words, and is probably a loan from surrounding languages. Consonants Jaminjung has 18 consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...s: Exter ...
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Northern Territory
The Northern Territory (abbreviated as NT; known formally as the Northern Territory of Australia and informally as the Territory) is an states and territories of Australia, Australian internal territory in the central and central-northern regions of Australia. The Northern Territory shares its borders with Western Australia to the west (129th meridian east), South Australia to the south (26th parallel south), and Queensland to the east (138th meridian east). To the north, the Northern Territory looks out to the Timor Sea, the Arafura Sea, and the Gulf of Carpentaria, including Western New Guinea and various other islands of the Indonesian archipelago. The NT covers , making it the third-largest Australian federal division, and List of country subdivisions by area, the 11th-largest country subdivision in the world. It is sparsely populated, with a population of only 249,000 – fewer than half the population of Tasmania. The largest population centre is the capital city of Darw ...
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Dual (grammatical Number)
Dual ( abbreviated ) is a grammatical number that some languages use in addition to singular and plural. When a noun or pronoun appears in dual form, it is interpreted as referring to precisely two of the entities (objects or persons) identified by the noun or pronoun acting as a single unit or in unison. Verbs can also have dual agreement forms in these languages. The dual number existed in Proto-Indo-European and persisted in many of its descendants, such as Ancient Greek and Sanskrit, which have dual forms across nouns, verbs, and adjectives; Gothic, which used dual forms in pronouns and verbs; and Old English (Anglo-Saxon), which used dual forms in its pronouns. It can still be found in a few modern Indo-European languages such as Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Lithuanian, Slovene, and Sorbian languages. The majority of modern Indo-European languages, including modern English, have lost the dual number through their development. Its function has mostly been replaced by the s ...
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Clitic
In morphology and syntax, a clitic ( , backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but depends phonologically on another word or phrase. In this sense, it is syntactically independent but phonologically dependent—always attached to a host.SIL International (2003). SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms: What is a clitic? "This page is an extract from the LinguaLinks Library, Version 5.0 published on CD-ROM by SIL International, 2003." Retrieved from . A clitic is pronounced like an affix, but plays a syntactic role at the phrase level. In other words, clitics have the ''form'' of affixes, but the distribution of function words. Clitics can belong to any grammatical category, although they are commonly pronouns, determiners, or adpositions. Note that orthography is not always a good guide for distinguishing clitic ...
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Ngaliwurru Dialect
Jaminjung is a moribund Australian language spoken around the Victoria River in the Northern Territory of Australia. There seems to be a steady increase in the number of speakers of the language with very few people speaking the language in 1967, about 30 speakers in 1991, and between 50 and 150 speakers in 2000. In 1971, Frances Kofod and others published a grammar of the Ngaliwuru language, while in 2011 a book of Jaminjung & Ngaliwuru names and uses of plants & animals was published. Phonology Vowels Jaminjung has 4 vowels: Vowel length is not distinctive. The close-mid vowel /e/ only appears in a small number of words, and is probably a loan from surrounding languages. Consonants Jaminjung has 18 consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...s: Exter ...
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Yirram Languages
The Yirram or Jaminjungan languages, also known as ''Western Mirndi'', are a branch of the Mirndi languages spoken around the Victoria River in the Northern Territory of Australia. The name of these languages is derived from the dual clitic In morphology and syntax, a clitic ( , backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a ... which is ''"yirram"'' in each of the languages. It consists of two languages, the Nungali language and the Jaminjung language. A third language has been proposed, Ngaliwurru, but it is often thought to be merely a dialect of the Jaminjung language. References Indigenous Australian languages in the Northern Territory {{ia-lang-stub ...
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