Glottolog sout2772 | ||
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Geographic
distribution Daly River region, northern Australia Linguistic classification A proposed primary family of Australian languages. Subdivisions Murrinh-patha
Ngan’gityemerri | ||
The Southern Daly languages are a proposed family of two distantly related Australian aboriginal languages. They are:
Classification
Southern Daly is a distant and problematic relationship. Murrinh-Patha was once thought to be an isolate, due to lexical data: It has, at most, an 11-percent shared vocabulary with any other language against which it has been compared. However, Murrinh-patha and Ngan’gityemerri correspond closely in their verbal inflections. Green (2003) makes a case that the formal correspondences in core morphological sequences of their finite verbs are too similar (in their complexities and their irregularities) to have come about through anything other than a shared genetic legacy from a common parent language. Nonetheless, lexically they have almost nothing in common, other than cognates in their words for 'thou' (nhinhi and nyinyi) and 'this' (kanhi and kinyi), and it is not clear what could explain this discrepancy.