Lardil language

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 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 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. ==Usage==

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 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" 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. ==Initiate languages==

Traditionally, the Lardil community held two initiation ceremonies for young men. Luruku, which involved circumcision, 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 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, the non-initiated were not forbidden to speak it. Damin, like marlda kangka, was phonologically, lexically and semantically distinct from Lardil, though its syntax and morphology seem to be analogous. Research into 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. == Phonology ==

Consonants 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 the tip (apex) of the tongue or its flattened blade makes contact with the place of articulation.) from instances of the velar nasal phoneme (as in wangal ‘boomerang’ Vowels Lardil has eight phonemically distinct vowels, differentiated by short and long variants at each of four places of articulation. Phonemic vowel length 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'. 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. Phonotactics Common alternations (consonants) • /r ~ d/, _# :The distinction between /r/ and /d/ is lost word-finally, as in 'bird/snake', which may be realized as [jaɻpur] or [jaɻpud], depending on the instance. • /d ~ n, j ~ ɲ/, _N :/d/ and /j/ may assimilate to a following nasal, as in bidngen > binngen 'woman', or yuujmen > yuunymen 'oldtime'. Augmentation acts on many monomoraic forms, producing, for example, /ʈæra/ 'thigh' from underlying *ter. High vowels tend to undergo lowering at 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 a number of i-final stems such as '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 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 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. ==Grammar==

Parts of speech Verbs The first major lexical class in Lardil 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 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; 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 Uninflected elements in Lardil include: • Particles, such as 'completely gone' or 'thus, therefore'. • Exclamations, such as (a guilty plea, roughly) and 'Gotcha!’ (said when something is offered and then snatched away). 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 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 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 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'. Nominal morphology 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. Nominative case The nominative case, which 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. Objective (oblique) case The objective case (-n ~ -in) has five general functions, marking: • the object of a verb in plain (i.e. unmarked non-future) form • the agent of a passive verb in plain form • the subject of a contemporaneous dependent clause (i.e. a 'while'/'when' clause) • the locative complement of a verb in the plain negative or negative imperative • the object of the sequential imperative (see section on verb morphology above). The objective case serves this purpose with negative verbs. Future The object of a verb in future tense (either negative or affirmative) is marked for futurity by a suffix (-kur ~ -ur ~ -r), as in the sentence below: {{interlinear|number=(1) The future marker also has four other functions. It marks: • the locative complement ('into the house', 'on the stone') of a future verb • the object of a verb in contemporaneous form • the object of a verb in the evitative form (often translated as 'be liable to V', 'might V') • the dative complement of certain verbs (e.g. 'for-water' in 'Ask him for water'). The instrumental case inflection is homophonous with the future marker, but both may appear on the same nominal in certain instances. Non-future The object of a verb in the (negative or affirmative) marked non-future also inflects for non-futurity. The non-future marking (-ngarr ~ -nga ~ -arr ~ -a) is also used to mark time adverbials in non-future clauses as well as the locative complement of a non-future verb. Verbal case In addition to these inflectional endings, Lardil features several morphologically verbal affixes that are semantically similar to case markers ("verbal case") and, like case endings, mark noun phrases rather than individual nouns. Allative and ablative meanings (i.e. movement to or from) are expressed with these endings; as are the desiderative and a second type of evitave; comitative, proprietive and privative. Verbalizing suffixes Lardil nominals may also take one of two derivational (verbalizing) suffixes: the Inchoative (-e ~ -a ~ -ya), which has the sense 'become X', and the Causative (-ri ~ -iri), which has the sense 'make X Y'; other verbalizing suffixes exist in Lardil but are far less productive than these two. Reduplication Reduplication is productive in verbal morphology, giving a non-future durative with the pattern V-tharr V (where V is a verb), having the sense 'keep on V-ing', and a future durative with V-thururr V-thur. ==Syntax==

Given the rich morphology of Lardil, it is not surprising that its word order is somewhat flexible; however, the basic sentence order has been described as SVO, with direct object either following or preceding indirect object and other dependents following these. Clitics appear clause-second and/or on either side of the verb. as in: Here, R is a maker of reflexivity. Part-whole compounds Though part-whole relations are sometimes expressed using the genitive case as in (1) below, it is more common to mark both part and whole with the same case, placing the 'part' nominal immediately after its possessor nominal, as in (2). == Vocabulary ==

Kinship terms Lardil has an intensely complex system of kinship terms reflecting 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 'pair of people, one of whom is the paternal great uncle/aunt or grandparent of the other'. The deceased is often known by the name of his/her death or burial place plus the necronym suffix , as in 'one who died at Wurdu'. Sometimes other strategies are used to refer to the dead, such as circumlocution via kinship terms. ==See also==