Tiwi (language)

Tiwi is the Aboriginal language of the islands of Melville and Bathurst on the northern coast of Australia. These two islands together form a single geographic feature and tribal zone, covering approximately 8,000 square kilometers. They are separated by a narrow strait, the width of which in some places does not reach even half a mile. Previously, the Tiwi tribe inhabited the entire territory of the islands, now 4 small settlements stood out (as a result of contact with European culture).

Due to the not very large distance between the tivi islands and the continent, it could be assumed that the tivi tribe and the tribes of the continent have long and closely communicated with each other. But the facts of language and culture indicate that such a contact was unlikely to take place, and the Tiwis were in fact isolated from the outside world until the first appearance of Europeans at the beginning of the 20th century .

It is very difficult to say anything about the kinship relations of the Tiwi language with other Australian languages. Capell's work (Capell 1940.1942) showed that prefixing languages ​​are concentrated mainly in the north of the continent and that noun-classifying languages such as tiwi are also mainly found in north. And yet, in this northern region there are a lot of different languages, and the work on establishing family ties between the tivi and these other languages ​​has not yet made significant progress.

This is most likely due to the fact that the tivi tribe had no linguistic contacts with other Australian languages, even Jiwadja and Larakia (the closest geographical neighbors) were separated from tivi by water at a distance of about 50 miles.

Tiwi is a polysynthetic agglutinative language , mainly prefiguring, with personal incorporation ( eng. Noun incorporating ), where synthesis occurs in the verb. All elements of a sentence in tiwi can be combined into one highly organized morphological structure. For example, the following sentence can be translated in one word in tiwi:

• He came and stole my wild honey this morning while I was sleeping. - jinuatəmənijilipaŋəmataṱaṱumaŋələpiaiŋkiṋa.

This type of construction of structures of very great complexity, very common in North America , is almost unique to Australia, and neither on the continent nor on the islands can be found anything like that.

One of the most striking and unusual abilities of the tivi language is the ability to incorporate nominal groups into the structure of the verb as a direct complement . In particular, in the above example, the noun phrase “wild honey” is represented by the form mataṱaṱumaŋələpi- .

This trait has been noted in very few Australian languages. What is strange, almost the same phenomenon was noticed in some American Indian languages.

Basic Word Order

In the absence of a large body of texts in the tiwi language, we can make an assumption that the OSV type is more typical for it:

“They made dance floors (dances), dance floors for Pelican and his brother Eagle” ^[2] .

Consonants

The Tiwi consonant system is a fairly typical example of the basic Australian type. There are 6 places of articulation in this type: bialabile, dental, alveolar, alveo-palatal, retroflex and velar - but not all of them are used in different languages ​​with distinction. In the tivi language, according to Osborne, there were only 4 places: tooth and alveo-palatal sounds merged into one phoneme, the same thing happened with alveolar and retro-reflex sounds.

A modern view of the consonant system of phonemes in the tivi language is reduced to the following table:

Osborne System:

Vowels

The Tiwi vowel system, like some other northern languages, differs from the vowel triangle characteristic of the rest of Australia. The difference is the fourth vowel, / o /. Thus, vowels in the tivi language form the following quadrilateral:

• Osborne, CR 1974. The Tiwi Language. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.