Dirbal

It belongs to the Pam-Nyung family , to the Dyirbalic group; this group includes 7 more languages, apparently extinct. Range (1972): Northeast Queensland, in the cities of Cairns , Innisfail and Tully . Three dialects stand out; actually dirbal, hiramay and mother (70% of the general vocabulary and “almost identical” grammar)

Before contact with Europeans (colonization since 1864 ), about 3,000 people were supposedly speaking dirbal. Then came the genocide (late XIX - early XX century ); in 20 years, 80% of Aboriginal people in the region have been exterminated. As of 1970, there were no more than 50 native speakers (Dixon), all of whom were fluent in English . Schmidt (1985) explored Young people's Dyirbal, a mixture of “poor dyrbal with poor English” - an interim stage of “language death”. Currently, the language can be considered as being in one of the last stages of extinction (according to some reports, only 5 native speakers remain). Attempts are being made to restore it; Bible translation is being prepared.

Three-phonemic vocalism: i, u, a. Two rows of closures: nasal vs. non-nasal (m, n, ny, ng -b, d, dy, g), as well as w, y, l, r, ry. In English borrowing, slotted changes to dy (missis-midyidyi). Opposition deaf / voiced is absent (publican-babuligan). A word cannot begin with a vowel or end with a vocal nasal.

The tongue belongs to the agglutinative type :

• balga-m! do not hit!
• balga-ri-m! don't hit yourself!
• balga-gani-m! don't hit all the time!
• balga-yara-m! don't hit so hard!
• balga-yara-gani-ri-m! - Do not hit yourself all the time so hard!

There are elements of inflectivity : the end of the non-future tense -nyu and -l carry information about the transitive nature of the verb. There are alternations at the joints of morphemes.

Syntactic relationships are marked on the dependent word. There are cases. Dependent predication carries a case ending on the verb:

bayi wangal bangul yarya-ngu nyina-nyu
KL1-NOM boomerang-NOM KL1-GEN1 male-GEN1 lie-NOT SKUD
buni-ngga nyadu-ngu-ra dyugumbi-ryu
bonfire-LOK Kindle-REL-LOK woman-ERG
'The boomerang of a man lies by the fire that a woman has lit

Two genitives (posessives): “simple” (the item belongs to X and is in X's) and “common” (the item previously belonged to X, or it belongs to him now, but X does not have it). Inalienable possession is expressed by a simple adjacency: balan dyugumbil mambu 'back of a woman'.

The verb does not have a category number (the plural in the name is expressed by reduplication , some words have special plural forms, the pronouns 1 and 2 of the person have a dual ). Time Category: Opposition Future vs. non-future (typologically rare case). Perhaps this contrast is connected not with time (which in this case is not in the dirbal at all), but with the mood (thus, future events, which can only be talked about, are opposed to real - present and past).

There are 4 name classes , denoted by service words - noun markers:

• I - “ masculine ” (bayi)
• II - “women, fire and dangerous objects” (according to Lakoff) (balancing)
• III - trees and fruits (balam)
• IV - everything else: stones, dirt, tongue ... (bala)

Locative indicators can join them: the opposition “river / not river”, “up / down”, “short / medium / long distance”:

bayi-dayi 'one far down the side of the mountain', balan-dawala 'one, at an average distance up the river'

Encoding of semantic roles: ergative (for full nouns and class indicators, acting as 3rd person pronouns), accusative (for 1-2 person pronouns).

The phenomenon of the so-called split ergativity (first described on dirbala material) is characteristic.

The word order , according to Dickson, is “exceptionally free,” but unmarked, judging by the examples, are OSV (ergative strategy) and SOV (accusative); this can be generalized as NP-Nom (NP-Erg) V. An ellipsis is common, the so-called topic chains (zero anaphora - the common noun phrase in the nominative is not repeated).

If the next coreferent noun group is in the ergative, then to replace it with anaphoric zero, you need to make a transformation resembling a passive one; the verb is translated into the intransitive with the special suffix -nga-, the agent is in the nominative, the patient is in the dative:

balan dyugumbil banggul yaryanggu mundan
KL2-NOM woman-NOM KL1-ERG male-ERG take-SKY
'A man took a woman with him'

balam miranybanngun dyugumbiryu babin
KL3-NOM haricot-NOM KL2-ERG woman-ERG clean-SKY
'Woman cleans beans'

balan dyugumbil banggun yaryangu mundan bagum miranygu
KL2-NOM woman-NOM KL1-ERG male-ERG take-SKYLESS KL3-DAT beans-DAT
balbinganyu
clean-PASS-NEBUD
'The man took the woman with him to clean the beans' (..., and she began to clean the beans to clean ... etc.)

Dirbala is characterized by such an interesting cultural-lexical phenomenon as a special selection of words when talking with a special class of relatives - the so-called “mother tongue” (went out of use in the 1930s after the death of the taboo system).

There are two lexical systems: guwal ("everyday" language), and dyalngui , used in conversation with " taboo " relatives: father-in-law , son-in-law and cross -sister (that is, the son of an uncle by mother or aunt by father) for a woman, mother-in-law , daughter-in-law and cross -sister for a man. In Dyalngui, the common words “bird”, “lizard”, “snake”, etc. are used; in guwal - specific names; the same with verbs: in everyday language there is no common word for “follow”, “stare”, “spy”, “look at night with the help of light” ... Thus, the vocabulary of the guwal is richer, but at the same time has no words for generic concepts . In addition, these sublanguages ​​have different pronoun systems.

• RMW Dixon. The Dyirbal Language of North Queensland. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1972.
• Lakoff, J. Thinking in the Mirror of Classifiers // New in Foreign Linguistics , XXIII, M., 1988.
• Schmidt A. Young People's Dyirbal; An Example of Language Death from Australia. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985.
• Ethnologue: Languages ​​of Australia: [1]
• Eriksen Th.H. Languages ​​at the margins of modernity: Linguistic minorities and the nation-state: [2] .
• Hallen C. The Australian Language Family.
• Chambers J. The Rainforest Aborigines.