User:Tiwiman
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I'm a Tiwi user. I can speak Tiwi. I mostly add entries and translations into my language.
Most of my edits can be sourced to this dictionary if you need to verify them.
Questions you might ask
[edit]Here are some questions I have been asked before around and about (or that I think might be common questions here on Wiktionary):
- Q: Is Tiwi the same as Twi?
- A: No. Twi is a dialect of the Akan language spoken in Africa. Tiwi is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken on the Tiwi Islands in the Northern Territory.
- Q: Is Tiwi similar to other Indigenous languages?
- A: Not really. Some words are borrowed from other Indigenous languages (the other main sources of loan words are English and Makassan, due to trade between the Makassans of Indonesia and the Indigenous Australians of the Northern Territory), but Tiwi isn't a Pama-Nyungan language. Indeed, it is an isolated language as it has no known relatives.
- Q: Does Tiwi have gendered nouns (like how many European languages do)?
- A: Yes. Unlike most other Indigenous languages, traditional Tiwi nouns are usually designated as either masculine or feminine (similar to the Romance languages of Europe). However, borrowed nouns usually do not have a gender. Usually you have to learn the gender when you learn the word, as unlike in most European languages, there isn't really a way to tell (whereas in, say, French, although there are numerous exceptions, usually feminine nouns end in the letter "e").
- Q: What do Old Tiwi and New Tiwi mean?
- A: These are just terms to describe the form of the Tiwi language being used (not the same as Old English, Middle English or English, though, which are actually all different languages, while Tiwi is one language). Old Tiwi is essentially the more traditional way of speaking Tiwi, while New Tiwi is the commoner's speak. So us Tiwi mob will usually use New Tiwi when talking to each other, while Old Tiwi is used in cultural settings. New Tiwi has a more modern set of vocabulary, which includes lot more borrowings from English while retaining the older loans from Makassan and mainland Aboriginal languages.
- Q: Why are Tiwi sentences so long?
- A: The reason our sentences are often quite long when compared to the English equivalent of that sentence is because a Tiwi sentence has to be relatively descriptive (kinda like a mini story I guess). There is an NIT article on this, which (to summarise) explains that a Tiwi sentence has to create a picture (you wouldn't just say "I went to the shops", for example, you'd describe with a lot more detail).