Damin - Linguistic Features

Linguistic Features

Demiin is the only click language outside of Africa.

Damin had a much more restricted and generic lexicon than everyday language. With only about 150 lexical roots, each word in Damin stood for several words of Lardil or Yangkaal. It had only two pronouns (n!a "me" and n!u "not me"), for example, compared to Lardil's nineteen, and had an antonymic prefix kuri- (tjitjuu "small", kuritjitjuu "large").

Grammatically, the Demiin registers of the Lardil and Yangkaal use all the grammatical suffixes of those languages, and so therefore are broadly similar.

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