Damin

Damin (Demiin in the practical orthography) was a ceremonial language used by the advanced initiated men of the Lardil (Leerdil in the practical orthography) tribe on Mornington Island, the largest island of the Wesley Group in the Gulf of Carpentaria.

Ceremonies

The Lardil had two initiation ceremonies for men, namely luruku (see luruku ceremony) which involved circumcision and warama (see warama ceremony ) which involved penile subincision. There are no ceremonies for women although woman do play an important rule in these ceremonies, especially in the luruku ceremony.

It is sometimes said that Demiin was a secret language, however this is misleading since there was no attempt to prevent the uninitiated (members of the Leerdil tribe) from overhearing it. However it was taught during the warama ceromony and, therefore, in isolation from the uninitiated. Nevertheless at least one elder is known, who, though not having been subincised, had an excellent command of Demiin, but this seems to have been a unique case.

It is said that Damin was taught to the initiate in a single sitting, preferably, though again, in practice it was probably learned over a longer period of time to the fact that it was used openly in the community. Normally it took several sessions before a novice mastered the basic rudiments. One speaker however claimed that he learnt to speak Demiin in a single session, on the other hand, also the case of two senior warama men is attested who lacked a firm command of Demiin, as they themselves ruefully admitted.

In any event, the majority of Damin lexical items, organised into semantic fields, was shouted out to the initiate in a single session. As the Damin items were announced, another speaker gave the Lardil equivalents.

Once the language had been learnt, the speakers were known as Demiinkurlda (Demiin possessors). They spoke the language particularly in ritual contexts, but they also spoke it in secular everyday life, when foraging, sitting about gossiping, and the like.

Grammatical structure

It is noted for being the only click language outside of Africa.

Damin had a much more restricted and generic lexicon than everyday Lardil. With only about 250 lexical roots, each word in Damin stood for several words of Lardil. 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"). In addition, it used all of the grammatical suffixes of Lardil.

Damin had three of Lardil's four pairs of vowels, [a, aː, i, iː, u, uː], in root words, plus the fourth, [ə, əː], in the suffixes. It had the same pulmonic egressive consonants as everyday Lardil, but this was augmented by four other airstream mechanisms: velaric ingressive (the nasal clicks), glottalic egressive (a velar ejective), pulmonic ingressive (a lateral fricative), and velaric egressive (a bilabial 'spurt'). The consonants of Damin, in the practical orthography and probable IPA equivalents, were:

	bilabial	laminal denti- alveolar	apical alveolar	apical postalveolar	laminal postalveolar	velar
plosives	b [p]	th [t̻]	d [t̺]	rd [t˞]	tj [t̠]	k [k]
nasal stops	m [m]	nh [n̻]	n [n̺]	rn [n˞]	ny [n̠]	ng [ŋ]
trill (flap?)			rr [ɾ]
approximants	(w [w])		r [ɹ]		y [j]	w [w]
lateral			l [l]
nasal clicks	m! [ŋʘ]	nh! [ŋǀ]	n! [ŋ!]	rn! [ŋ!˞]
ejective						k' [kʼ]
ingressive fricative			L [ɬ↓]
egressive click	p' [kʘ↑]

Actual situation

The Yangkaal of Denham and Forsyth Islands, who spoke a related Tangkic language, once also used Demiin. However, the last warama ceremony was held in the 1950s, and Demiin is no longer in use by either the Yangkaal or the Lardil. Although the Lardil say that Demiin was invented by a mythological figure in Dreamtime, it would seem that long ago Lardil elders deliberately invented an initiation language. The result is a remarkable tribute to their ingenuity.

References

• R. M. W. Dixon, The Languages of Australia (1980)
• D. McKnight, People, Countries and the Rainbow Serpent (1999)
• K. Hale Deep-Surface Canonical Disparities in Relation to Analysis and Change (1973)

External link

• Damin