1B – DIFFERENCES BETWEEN NGAN’GIKURUNGGURR AND NGEN’GIWUMIRRI

Differences between Ngan’gikurunggurr and Ngen’giwumirri

So in what sort of ways do these two languages differ? Some of the differences are lexical. That is to say that speakers of each language use different words for the same thing. For example, Ngan'gikurunggurr speakers call a saltwater crocodile awarrapun, whereas Ngen'giwumirri speakers call it ayerrkinwari. Of the 637 headwords in the Ngan’gi Dictionary which have distinct entries for Ngan'gikurunggurr and Ngen'giwumirri, about 180 involve completely different words in this way. Another way in which these languages differ is that sometimes we find that both languages use the ‘same’ word, but with minor sound changes, eg.

We can see some patterns in these changes. From the first two examples it seems that perhaps some Ngan'gikurunggurr words with i are changed to u in Ngen'giwumirri. This is true, however these sorts of changes are not rules of the language but simply tendencies. In fact we could even find a few examples that operate the other way.

However we can summarise the most frequent sound tendencies distinguishing between the way Ngan'gikurunggurr and Ngen'giwumirri people speak as;

Of the 637 headwords in the Ngan’gi Dictionary which have distinct entries for Ngan'gikurunggurr and Ngen'giwumirri, about 450 involve the ‘same’ word, but with these kinds of minor sound changes. It is these sorts of sound changes that have helped create the generally accepted view amongst Ngan'gi speakers that Ngan'gikurunggurr is the softer or lighter way of talking, and that Ngen'giwumirri is rougher or heavier.

In addition to lexical differences and sound changes, the main difference between Ngan'gikurunggurr and Ngen'giwumirri is the number of inflections that finite verbs have. If you look at the Finite Verb Tables, you'll notice that in general Ngen'giwumirri finite verbs have 4 tenses inflections, whereas Ngan'gikurunggurr finite verbs have just 3 tense inflections. Why does Ngan'gikurunggurr have 3 while Ngen'giwumirri has 4? Well it seems fairly clear that the Ngan'gikurunggurr inflectional category that we've labelled 'Doing it/Done it' is a merger of the two Ngen'giwumirri inflectional categories that we've labelled 'Do it now' and 'Did it before'. It seems that Ngan'gikurunggurr has undergone a historical change whereby the difference between these two categories was lost. In Ngen'giwumirri the 'Do it now' form of finite verbs always ends in the sound m, and the 'Did it before' form of finite verbs always ends in the sound ny. It looks as though the final nasal sound of the finite verb was an old suffix that carefully distinguished between these two tenses. However in Ngan'gikurunggurr this final nasal sound of the finite verb started to change to be like the sound that follows it, becoming m when the following sound was a p or b or w, becoming ny when the following sound was a ty or sy, becoming ng when the following sound was a k or g, etc. And once it started to do this (linguists call this assimilation), the final nasal sound lost its ability to discriminate between present and past tense.

This distinction made by NgW speakers, and lost for NgK speakers, is represented in the example below.