Demiin

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Demiin

Spoken in

Australia
speaker almost no

Demiin (often spelled Damin ) was a ceremonial language spoken by the men of the Lardil (pronounced Leerdil ) and Yangkaal tribes who had reached the second stage of initiation. Both tribes inhabit islands in the Gulf of Carpentaria ; the Leerdil live on Mornington Island , the largest island in the Wellesley Group, and the Yangkaal live on Forsyth Island. Their languages ​​belong to the same family , the Tankic language family ( Tangka means person in all Tangkic languages). Compared to the other members of this language family, Leerdil has developed furthest away from the others, while the other members of this family can communicate with each other and with Yangkaal. The Leerdil word Demiin can be translated as being still .

Ceremonies

The Leerdil know two initiation ceremonies for men, on the one hand the Luruku ceremony , which is connected with circumcision , and the Warama ceremony , which is connected with subincision . There are no ceremonies for women, although women play an important role in both ceremonies, especially the Luruku ceremony.

The claim that Demiin was a secret language is sometimes encountered, but this is misleading in that there has been no attempt to hide the use of Demiin from the uninitiated members of the Leerdil. On the other hand, however, Demiin was only taught during the Warama ceremonies and therefore with the complete exclusion of non-initiated members. There is also at least one tribal elder known to have an excellent knowledge of the Demiin, although he had not completed any Warama ceremonies. But it seems to have been an isolated case.

Demiin lexemes were divided into different semantic fields. The learning process took place (ideally) in a single session and consisted of calling out individual lexemes to the candidate. Each time a new lexeme was introduced, a second spokesman announced the Leerdil equivalent. However, it usually took several sessions before a candidate mastered the basics needed to use Demiin in public. At least one spokesperson claimed that he had learned demiin in a single session; on the other hand, two Warama elders are known to admit that they do not have sufficient knowledge of Demiin.

The candidates who had successfully learned Demiin once were called Demiinkurlda (Demiin Owners). They used the language especially in a ritual context, but also in everyday life, at group meetings, when spreading gossip and the like.

Grammatical structure

Demiin is best known for being the only language outside of Africa that uses click sounds.

With around 150 lexemes, Demiin had a much more limited vocabulary than the normal leerdil. Each demiin word corresponded to several leerdil words. For example, Demiin only had two personal pronouns, namely ( n! A "I" and n! U "not I"), compared to the 19 personal pronouns of Leerdil. In addition, Demiin used all of the grammatical affixes of Leerdil with a few exceptions . Demiin, for example, used an antonymic prefix kuri- (e.g. tjitjuu "small", kuritjitjuu "not small" = "large"). The demiin of the leerdil and the yangkaal are grammatically almost identical, except for a few small differences in the formation of suffixes.

phonetics

Damin had three of the four Leerdil vowels, namely [⁠ a ⁠] , [ å ], [⁠ i ⁠] , [ i ], [⁠ u ⁠] and [ U ] in word stems, and a fourth vocal, [⁠ ə ⁠] or [ əː ] wherein the suffixes.

Consonants of demiin

It had the same egressive constants as the normal Leerdil, but this was expanded to include four additional airflow mechanisms :

The following table shows the demiin consonants in practical orthography and in the IPA :

bilabial lamino-
dental
or alveolar 		apico-
alveolar		 apico-
postalveolar 		laminal
postalveolar		 velar
Plosives b [⁠ p ⁠] th [t̻] d [t̺] rd [t˞] tj [t̠] k [⁠ k ⁠]
Nasal plosives m [⁠ m ⁠] nh [n̻] n [n̺] rn [n˞] ny [n̠] ng [⁠ ŋ ⁠]
Flaps rr [⁠ ɾ ⁠]
Approximants (w [⁠ w ⁠] ) r [⁠ ɹ ⁠] y [⁠ j ⁠] w [⁠ w ⁠]
Lateral approximants l [⁠ l ⁠]
Nasal clicks m! [ŋʘ] nh! [ŋǀ] n! [ŋǃ] rn! [ŋǃ˞]
Ejectives k ' [kʼ]
Ingressive fricatives L [ɬ ↓]
Egressive clicks p ' [kʘ ↑]

The origin of Demiin

The origin of Demiin is unclear. According to the Leerdil and Yangkaal, Demiin was created by a mythological figure in dreamtime , while linguists like K. Hale believe that the language was invented by tribal elders. N. Evans et al. a. even suspect, after examining the myths of both tribes, that it was the Yangkaal elders who invented Demiin and passed this on to the Leerdil and not the other way around.

Current situation

The cultural traditions of the Leerdil and Yangkaal have been in decline for several decades, and the languages ​​of both groups have almost died out. The last Warama ceremony was held in the 1950s ; therefore demiin is not used today by either the Leerdil or the Yangkaal. However, some time ago a revival of cultural traditions began and a Luruku ceremony was recently celebrated. It remains to be seen whether the Warama ceremony will also be revived.

literature

  • RMW Dixon : The Languages ​​of Australia . CUP, Cambridge 1980, ISBN 0-521-22329-6 .
  • David McKnight: People, Countries and the Rainbow Serpent. System of classification among the Lardiff of Mornington Island (Oxforsd studies in anthropological linguistics. 12). OUP, New York 1999, ISBN 0-19-509621-5 .
  • Kenneth Hale: Deep-Surface Canonical Disparities in Relation to Analysis and Change. An Australian Example. In: Current Trends in Linguistics. Volume 11 (1973), pp. 401-458.
  • Kenneth Hale, David Nash: Damin and Lardil Phonotactics . In: Darrell T. Tryon, Michael Walsh (Eds.): Boundary Rider. Essays in honor of Geoffrey O'Grady . RSPAS, Canberra 1997, ISBN 0-85883-440-2 , pp. 247-259.
  • Paul Memmott, Nicholas Evans , Richard Robins, Ian Lilley: Understanding Isolation and Change in Island Human Population through a study of Indigenous Cultural Patterns in the Gulf of Carpentaria. In: Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia. Volume 130 (2006), Issue 1, pp. 29-47, ISSN  0372-1426