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Southern Daly languages

Southern Daly
(generally accepted)
Geographic
distribution:
Daly River region, northern Australia
Linguistic classification: A proposed primary family of Australian languages.
Subdivisions:
Glottolog: sout2772
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The Daly languages (color), among the other non-Pama-Nyungan languages (grey)

  Southern Daly languages. Murrinh-patha is on the coast, Ngan’gityemerri in the interior.

The Southern Daly languages are a proposed family of two distantly related Australian aboriginal languages. They are:

Southern Daly is a distant and problematic relationship. Murrinh-Patha was once thought to be an isolate, due to lexical data: It has, at most, an 11-percent shared vocabulary with any other language against which it has been compared. However, Murrinh-patha and Ngan’gityemerri correspond closely in their verbal inflections. Green (2003) makes a case that the formal correspondences in core morphological sequences of their finite verbs are too similar (in their complexities and their irregularities) to have come about through anything other than a shared genetic legacy from a common parent language. Nonetheless, lexically they have almost nothing in common, other than cognates in their words for 'thou' (nhinhi and nyinyi) and 'this' (kanhi and kinyi), and it is not clear what could explain this discrepancy.



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