Yidiny language
| Yidiny | |
|---|---|
| Native to | Australia |
| Region | Queensland |
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Native speakers
|
10 (2005) to 140 (2006 census) |
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Pama–Nyungan
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| Dialects |
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| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | yidi1250 |
| AIATSIS | Y117 |
Yidiny (green, with arrow) among other Pama–Nyungan languages (tan)
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Yidiny (also spelled Yidiɲ, Yidiñ, Yidinj, Yidinʸ, IPA: [ˈjidiɲ]) is a nearly extinct Australian Aboriginal language, spoken by the Yidindji tribe of northern Queensland.
Yidiny form a separate branch of Pama–Nyungan. It is sometimes grouped with Djabugay as Yidinyic, but Bowern (2011) retains Djabugay in its traditional place within the Paman languages.
It is not clear if the two rhotics are trill and flap, or tap and approximant.
The Yidiny language has a number of particles that change the meaning of an entire clause. These, unlike other forms in the language, such as nouns, verbs and gender markers, have no grammatical case and take no tense inflections. The particles in the Yidiny language: nguju - 'not' (nguju also functions as the negative interjection 'no'), giyi - 'don't', biri - 'done again', yurrga - 'still', mugu - 'couldn't help it' (mugu refers to something unsatisfactory but that is impossible to avoid doing), jaymbi / jaybar - 'in turn'. E.g. 'I hit him and he jaymbi hit me', 'He hit me and I jaybar hit him'.
Pronoun and other pronoun-like words are classified as two separate lexical categories. This is for morphosyntactic reasons: pronouns show nominative-accusative case marking while demonstratives, deictics, and other nominals show absolutive-ergative cad marking.
In common with several other Australian Aboriginal languages, Yidiny is an agglutinative ergative-absolutive language. There are many affixes which indicate a number of different grammatical concepts, such as the agent of an action (shown by -nggu), the ablative case (shown by -mu or -m), the past tense (shown by -nyu) and the present and future tenses (both represented with the affix -ng).
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