Murrinh-patha language

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Murrinh-patha
Region Wadeye, Northern Territory, Australia
Ethnicity Murrinh-Patha
Native speakers
 1,200 (2005) to 1,800 (2006 census)[1]
Southern Daly?
  • Murrinh-patha
Latin
Language codes
ISO 639-3 mwf
Glottolog murr1258[2]
AIATSIS[1] N3

Murrinh-patha (literally "language-good"), called Garama by the Jaminjung, is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken by over 2,500 people, most of whom live in Wadeye in the Northern Territory, where it is the dominant language of the community. It is spoken by the Murrinh-Patha people, as well as several other peoples whose languages are extinct or nearly so, including the Mati Ke and Marri-Djabin.

Names

Murrinh-patha can also be spelled Murrinh Patha, Murrinh-Patha, Murinbada, Murinbata, and Garama.[3] Garama is the Jaminjung name for the language and its speakers. Murrinh-patha literally means "language-good."

Dialects

There are three similar dialects of the Murrinh-Patha language, namely Murrinhdiminin, Murrinhkura, and Murrinhpatha.[3]

Status

For the Murrinh-Patha speakers, their language is more than a set of rules and a specific grammar. It is very closely tied with or determines for them their land, identity, associations and relation to the surrounding.[4]

Because of its role as the lingua franca in the region, Murrinh-patha is one of the few Australian Aboriginal languages whose number of speakers has increased and whose usage has expanded over the past generation.[5] Unlike many indigenous languages (particularly those of eastern Australia), children are actively acquiring the language and there is a language dictionary and grammar, and there have been portions of the Bible published in Murrinh-Patha from 1982-1990.[3] This renders Murrinh-patha one of Australia's few indigenous languages that is not endangered. Additionally, Murrinh-Patha is taught in schools and all locals are encouraged to learn it due to the wide range of use and functions of the language locally.[6]

Classification

Murrinh-Patha was once thought to be a language isolate, based on comparisons of lexical data: at most 11% of its vocabulary is shared with any other language it has been tested against.[7] However, its verbal inflections correspond closely to those of another language, Ngan’gityemerri (Ngan’gi). Green (2003) makes a case that the formal correspondences in core morphological sequences of the finite verbs of the two languages are too similar (in their complexities and their irregularities) to have come about through anything other than shared descent from a common parent language; the two languages make up the Southern Daly language family.[8] Nonetheless, other than having cognates in their finite-verb morphology and in their words for 'thou' (nhinhi and nyinyi) and 'this' (kanhi and kinyi),[9] they have little vocabulary in common, though their grammatical structures are very similar. It is not clear what could explain this discrepancy.

Similarly, although differing in the vocabulary, Murrinh-Patha and the decaying Mati Ke language share the syntax structure.[4]

Grammar

Typology

Murrinh-Patha is a head-marking language with a complex verb generally considered to be polysynthetic.[10] The sequencing of morphemes in the verb is highly structured, but the ordering of words in a sentence is largely free.[11]

Phonology

Murrinh-Patha has a “long and flat” array of consonants like most Australian Aboriginal phonologies,[12] with six places of articulation (bilabial, lamino-dental, alveolar, post-alveolar retroflex, palatal and velar), but only a limited range of contrastive manners of articulation. There are oral obstruents and nasal stops at all points of articulation; however there are no phonemic fricatives.[13]

The vowel system is very simple, with four vowels /a, ə, i, u/.[14]

Words often start with "ng" sound pronounced as in "singer":[4] /[ŋ]/.

Nouns

The Murrinh-Patha language displays extensive classifications both of nouns and verbs. Nouns are divided into ten classes or genders along roughly semantic lines, with some exceptions. Each noun class is associated with particles which must agree with the class.

Pronouns

In Murrinh-Patha there are four categories which in total make up for 31 pronouns. The categories are: singular, dual, paucal (referring to 3 to 15 individuals) and plural (more than 15). While some of the pronouns stand on their own in the sentence structure, many are embodied in the middle of a verb.[4]

Verbs

Verbs occur in some 38 different conjugations. Each verb is morphologically complex, with the verb root surrounded by prefixes and suffixes identifying subject, object, tense, and mood; these affixes are different in the different conjugations.

Arithmetics

The count in Murrinh-Patha ends on the number five.[4]

Examples

  • kardu = "person"
  • nanthi thay = "tree"
  • ngarra da ngurran = "I'm going home"
  • thangkunuma mi kanhi-yu? = "how much for the food?"
  • ku were dirranngingarlbarl = "the dog is barking at me"[15]
  • nhinhi, nanku-nitha, nankungitha, nanku, nankuneme, nankungime, nanki = "you"[4]
  • ku yagurr = "lizard"[4]

Writing System

Murrinh-patha uses a Latin script.[3]

References

  • Abley, M. (2003). Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages. Toronto, ON: Random House Canada. pp. 1–44.
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Notes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Murrinh-patha at the Australian Indigenous Languages Database, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies
  2. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 https://www.ethnologue.com/language/mwf.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  5. ↑ Abley, Mark. Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2003. Page 18-19.
  6. ↑ http://www.omniglot.com/writing/murrinh-patha.php
  7. ↑ Reid, N.J. Ngan’gityemerri. Unpublished PhD thesis, Australian National University, Canberra, 1990.
  8. ↑ Green, I. "The Genetic Status of Murrinh-patha" in Evans, N., ed. "The Non-Pama-Nyungan Languages of Northern Australia: comparative studies of the continent’s most linguistically complex region". Studies in Language Change, 552. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, 2003.
  9. ↑ Note that Ngan’gityemerri has no nh, and so would expect to have ny where its relatives have nh.
  10. ↑ Nordlinger, R. Verbal morphology in Murrinh-Patha: Evidence for templates. Morphology 20(2): 321-341. 2010.
  11. ↑ Walsh, M. The Murinypata language of north-west Australia. Unpublished PhD thesis, Australian National University, 1976. p. 276
  12. ↑ Butcher, A. Australian Aboriginal languages: consonant-salient phonologies and the "place-of-articulation imperative". In Speech production: Models, phonetic processes and techniques, New York: Psychology Press, 2006.
  13. ↑ Mansfield, J. Polysynthetic sociolinguistics: the language and culture of Murrinh Patha Youth. Unpublished PhD thesis, Australian National University, 2014.
  14. ↑ Street, C. and Mollinjin G.P. The phonology of Murinbata. Work Papers of SIL-AAB, Series A, Volume 5. 1981
  15. ↑ http://langwidj.org/Murrinhpatha-phrasebook/html/
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