1 - THE LANGUAGE AND ITS SPEAKERS

Summary

Linguistic type

Yidiɲ is a fairly typical Australian language (see Dixon 1972: 1–21 for a brief account of some of the recurring features of languages of the continent). It is basically agglutinative and almost exclusively suffixing. The norm word order appears to be ‘subject–object–verb’, but considerable deviation from this is possible.

Its phonology accords with the normal Australian pattern: there are no sibilants or fricatives, and no distinction of voicing. The sixteen segmental phonemes comprise four stop-nasal series (bilabial, apicoalveolar, lamino-palatal and dorso-velar), one lateral, two rhotics, two semi-vowels and three vowels. Vowel length is phonologically significant but (apart from a set of exceptions involving only a dozen lexical items) no roots involve long vowels. Length is introduced through some morphological processes (of affixation) and through a number of rather sweeping phonological processes. The latter operate to satisfy certain stress targets: a word should, if possible, contain a whole number of disyllabic units (either all of the type ‘stressed-unstressed’ or else all of the type ‘unstressed-stressed’). If it does have an odd number of syllables then the extra syllable must be unstressed.

There are clearly defined classes of noun, adjective, locational qualifier, time qualifier, (first and second person) pronoun, deictic, verb, adverb, particle and interjection. In addition to singular and non-singular forms of pronouns there is a dual in the first (but not the second) person.