Grammatical Features
Ngan’gi is a non-Pama-Nyungan language with strong head-marking properties. It has 31 finite verbs, which combine with a large class of coverbs to form morphologically complex verb words with the type of information requiring a sentence to convey in English (including information about the subject, the object and other participants). Ngan’gi also has a system of 16 noun classes (including bound prefixes and free words), which exhibit agreement properties on modifying words. Ngan’gi also has sound features which are unusual by Australian standards, including a three-way obstruent contrast; it has two series of stops, as well as phonemic fricatives.
Read more about this topic: Ngan'gityemerri Language
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