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.[1] 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.[2] Nonetheless, lexically they have almost nothing in common, other than cognates in their words for 'thou' (nhinhi and nyinyi) and 'this' (kanhi and kinyi),[3] and it is not clear what could explain this discrepancy.
Vocabulary
The following basic vocabulary items are from Tryon (1968).[4]
^Reid, N.J. Ngan’gityemerri. Unpublished PhD thesis, Australian National University, Canberra, 1990.
^Green, I. "The Genetic Status of Murrinh-patha" in Evans, N., ed. "The Non-Pama-Nyungan Languages of Northern Australia: comparative studies of the continent’s most linguistically complex region". Studies in Language Change, 552. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, 2003.
^Note that Ngan’gityemerri has no nh, and so one would expect it to have ny where its relatives have nh.
^Tryon, Darrell T. "The Daly River Languages: A Survey". In Aguas, E.F. and Tryon, D. editors, Papers in Australian Linguistics No. 3. A-14:21-49. Pacific Linguistics, The Australian National University, 1968. doi:10.15144/PL-A14.21
Tryon, D. T. (1968). "The Daly River languages: a survey". Papers in Australian Linguistics. 3: 21–36.
Tryon, D. T. (1974). Daly family languages, Australia. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
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