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Djaru Language
Djaru (Tjaru) is a Pama–Nyungan language spoken in the south-eastern Kimberley region of Western Australia. As with most Pama-Nyungan languages, Djaru includes single, dual and plural pronoun numbers. Djaru also includes sign-language elements in its lexicon (a common trait of Aboriginal Australian languages generally). Nouns in Djaru do not include gender classes, and apart from inflections, words are formed through roots, compounding or reduplication. Word order in Djaru is relatively free (again a common trait of Aboriginal Australian languages) and has the ability to split up noun phrases. The Djaru language has a relatively small number of verbs, as compared to most languages, and thus utilizes a system of 'preverbs' and complex verbs to compensate. Djaru also has an avoidance language. Avoidance languages, sometimes known as 'mother-in-law languages', are special registers within a language that are spoken between certain family members (typically a married man and his ...
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Western Australia
Western Australia (commonly abbreviated as WA) is a state of Australia occupying the western percent of the land area of Australia excluding external territories. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean to the north and west, the Southern Ocean to the south, the Northern Territory to the north-east, and South Australia to the south-east. Western Australia is Australia's largest state, with a total land area of . It is the second-largest country subdivision in the world, surpassed only by Russia's Sakha Republic. the state has 2.76 million inhabitants  percent of the national total. The vast majority (92 percent) live in the south-west corner; 79 percent of the population lives in the Perth area, leaving the remainder of the state sparsely populated. The first Europeans to visit Western Australia belonged to the Dutch Dirk Hartog expedition, who visited the Western Australian coast in 1616. The first permanent European colony of Western Australia occurred following the ...
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Djaru People
The Djaru people are an Aboriginal Australian people of the southern Kimberley region of Western Australia. Language Djaru is a member of the Ngumbin language family, and is related to Walmajarri. Country The Djaru people ranged along Margaret River as far as the Mary River Junction. Their land took in the headwaters of Christmas Creek, ran eastward to Cummins Range, Sturt Creek Station up to the border with the Northern Territory. Its northern boundary lay in the vicinity of the Nicholson Station homestead, and the headwaters of the Ord River above the Dixon Range, and including the areas east of Alice Downs as far as Hall's Creek and the Margaret River gorge. In Norman Tindale's estimation the total land range encompassed something like . The area is now known as the ''Kutjungka Region''. Trade The Djaru, like the Gija, much admired the composite spears, fitted with barbed pegs, of their southern neighbours, fashioned from mulga hardwood and ''witjuti'' bush shrubs and ...
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Pama–Nyungan Languages
The Pama–Nyungan languages are the most widespread family of Australian Aboriginal languages, containing 306 out of 400 Aboriginal languages in Australia. The name "Pama–Nyungan" is a merism: it derived from the two end-points of the range: the Pama languages of northeast Australia (where the word for "man" is ) and the Nyungan languages of southwest Australia (where the word for "man" is ). The other language families indigenous to the continent of Australia are occasionally referred to, by exclusion, as non-Pama–Nyungan languages, though this is not a taxonomic term. The Pama–Nyungan family accounts for most of the geographic spread, most of the Aboriginal population, and the greatest number of languages. Most of the Pama–Nyungan languages are spoken by small ethnic groups of hundreds of speakers or fewer. The vast majority of languages, either due to disease or elimination of their speakers, have become extinct, and almost all remaining ones are endangered in some ...
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Ngumpin–Yapa Languages
The Ngumpin–Yapa a.k.a. Ngarrka–Ngumpin languages are a family of Pama–Nyungan languages of the Pilbara region of Australia.Bowern, Claire. 2011. How Many Languages Were Spoken in Australia?' (correcte * Ngarrga languages (Yapa: Warlmanpa and Warlpiri) * Ngumbin languages (Walmajarri, Djaru, Gurindji and Mudburra) Ngardi, once classified as either Ngarrga (2002) or Ngumpin (2004), has been reassigned to the Wati languages. Vocabulary Capell Capell or Capel is a surname. Notable people with the name include: Capell * Arthur Capell, 1st Baron Capell of Hadham (1608–1649), English politician * Arthur Capell, 1st Earl of Essex (1631–1683), English statesman * Arthur Capell (1902–1 ... (1940) lists the following basic vocabulary items for the Ngumpin–Yapa languages:Capell, Arthur. 1940The Classification of Languages in North and North-West Australia ''Oceania'' 10(3): 241-272, 404-433. : References *McConvell and Laughren (2004) "The Ngumpin–Yapa subgroup". ...
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Ngumbin Languages
Ngumbin (or Ngumpin) languages are a small language family of Australia, consisting of (from west to east): *Walmajarri *Djaru * Gurindji (Gurindji proper, Bilinarra, Wanyjirra, Malngin, Ngarinyman) *Mudburra In 2004 it was demonstrated that Ngumbin is related to the neighboring Ngarrkic languages. See also *Ngumpit, a name used by the Gurindji, Malngin, Bilinara, Mudburra and Ngarinyman The Ngarinman or Ngarinyman people are an Aboriginal Australian people of the Northern Territory who spoke the Ngarinyman language. Country According to an estimate made by Norman Tindale, the Ngarinman held some of territory. Their central do ... peoples to refer to themselves as a group Footnotes References *McConvell and Laughren (2004) "The Ngumpin–Yapa subgroup". In Claire Bowern & Harold Koch, ''Australian Languages: Classification and the Comparative Method.'' Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Indigenous Australian languages in Western Australia ...
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Kimberley (Western Australia)
The Kimberley is the northernmost of the nine regions of Western Australia. It is bordered on the west by the Indian Ocean, on the north by the Timor Sea, on the south by the Great Sandy Desert, Great Sandy and Tanami Desert, Tanami deserts in the region of the Pilbara, and on the east by the Northern Territory. The region was named in 1879 by government surveyor Alexander Forrest after Secretary of State for the Colonies John Wodehouse, 1st Earl of Kimberley. History The Kimberley was one of the earliest settled parts of Australia, with the first humans landing about 65,000 years ago. They created a complex culture that developed over thousands of years. Yam (vegetable), Yam (''Dioscorea hastifolia'') agriculture was developed, and rock art suggests that this was where some of the earliest boomerangs were invented. The worship of Wandjina deities was most common in this region, and a complex theology dealing with the transmigration of souls was part of the local people's r ...
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Preverb
Although not widely accepted in linguistics, the term preverb is used in Caucasian (including all three families: Northwest Caucasian, Northeast Caucasian and Kartvelian), Caddoan, Athabaskan, and Algonquian linguistics to describe certain elements prefixed to verbs. In the context of Indo-European languages, the term is usually used for separable verb prefixes. Theoretically, any prefix could be called a preverbal element. However, in practice, the term ''preverb'' applies more narrowly in those families and refers to a prefixed element that is normally outside the premise of verbal morphology like locations of noun elements or, less often, noun elements themselves. Northwest Caucasian languages In Northwest Caucasian languages, they can have nouns, directional and locative preverbs (like prepositions), like in this example from Ubykh: Caddoan In Caddoan linguistics, preverbal elements are less well defined as a class, and often, "preverb" designates a part of the verbal r ...
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Avoidance Language
Avoidance speech is a group of sociolinguistic phenomena in which a special restricted speech style must be used in the presence of or in reference to certain relatives. Avoidance speech is found in many Australian Aboriginal languages and Austronesian languages as well as some North American languages, Highland East Cushitic languages and Southern Bantu languages. Chinese naming taboo prohibits speaking and writing syllables or characters that appear in the names of esteemed people, such as emperors, parents, and ancestors. Avoidance speech styles tend to have the same phonology and grammar as the standard language they are a part of. The lexicon, however, tends to be smaller than in normal speech since the styles are only used for limited communication. Australia Mother-in-law languages Avoidance speech in Australian Aboriginal languages is closely tied to elaborate tribal kinship systems in which certain relatives are considered taboo. Avoidance relations differ from t ...
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Ergative–absolutive Alignment
In linguistic typology, ergative–absolutive alignment is a type of morphosyntactic alignment in which the single argument (" subject") of an intransitive verb behaves like the object of a transitive verb, and differently from the agent of a transitive verb. Examples include Basque, Georgian, Mayan, Tibetan, and certain Indo-European languages (such as the Kurdish languages and many Indo-Aryan languages like Hindi–Urdu). It has controversially also been attributed to the Semitic modern Aramaic languages. This is in contrast to nominative–accusative alignment, which is observed in English and most other Indo-European languages, where the single argument of an intransitive verb ("She" in the sentence "She walks") behaves grammatically like the agent of a transitive verb ("She" in the sentence "She finds it") but different from the object of a transitive verb ("her" in the sentence "He likes her"). When ergative–absolutive alignment is coded by grammatical case, the case use ...
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Subject–object–verb Word Order
In linguistic typology, a subject–object–verb (SOV) language is one in which the subject, object, and verb of a sentence always or usually appear in that order. If English were SOV, "Sam beer drank" would be an ordinary sentence, as opposed to the actual Standard English "Sam drank beer" which is subject–verb–object (SVO). The term is often loosely used for ergative languages like Adyghe and Basque that really have agents instead of subjects. Incidence Among natural languages with a word order preference, SOV is the most common type (followed by subject–verb–object; the two types account for more than 75% of natural languages with a preferred order). Languages that have SOV structure include all Indo-Iranian languages ( Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, Pāli, Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Sindhi, Sinhalese, Urdu, Zazaki, Kurdish), Ainu, Akkadian, Amharic, Armenian, Assyrian, Aymara, Basque, Burmese, Burushaski, Cherokee, Dakota, Dogon la ...
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Avoidance Speech
Avoidance speech is a group of sociolinguistic phenomena in which a special restricted speech style must be used in the presence of or in reference to certain relatives. Avoidance speech is found in many Australian Aboriginal languages and Austronesian languages as well as some North American languages, Highland East Cushitic languages and Southern Bantu languages. Chinese naming taboo prohibits speaking and writing syllables or characters that appear in the names of esteemed people, such as emperors, parents, and ancestors. Avoidance speech styles tend to have the same phonology and grammar as the standard language they are a part of. The lexicon, however, tends to be smaller than in normal speech since the styles are only used for limited communication. Australia Mother-in-law languages Avoidance speech in Australian Aboriginal languages is closely tied to elaborate tribal kinship systems in which certain relatives are considered taboo. Avoidance relations differ fro ...
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Bush Tucker
Bush tucker, also called bush food, is any food native to Australia and used as sustenance by Indigenous Australians, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, but it can also describe any native flora or fauna used for culinary or medicinal purposes, regardless of the continent or culture. Animal native foods include kangaroo, emu, witchetty grubs and crocodile, and plant foods include fruits such as quandong, kutjera, spices such as lemon myrtle and vegetables such as warrigal greens and various native yams. Traditional Indigenous Australians' use of bushfoods has been severely affected by the settlement of Australia in 1788 and subsequent settlement by non-Indigenous peoples. The introduction of non-native foods, together with the loss of traditional lands, resulting in reduced access to native foods by Aboriginal people, and destruction of native habitat for agriculture, has accentuated the reduction in use. Since the 1970s, there has been recognition of the n ...
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