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Kalyahekwe: Difference between revisions
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==Morphology== | ==Morphology== | ||
Like most Settameric languages, Kalyah is highly synthetic, meaning it exhibits a great deal of synthesis and a very high morpheme-to-word ratio. It is agglutinating, and thus builds up words by stringing morpheme after morpheme together, rather than having several affixes which carry numerous different pieces of information, but certain morphemes can fuse together. | |||
Kalyahekwe distinguishes between animate and inanimate categories in nouns and person markers. Animate nouns are generally living things that can move on their own, and inanimate ones generally nonliving things, although that is not a simple rule because of the cultural specifics. Some words are distinguished by their noun class and have the same root; for example, ''hacikwi'' means "fir tree" and is animate, while ''hacikw'' is inanimate and means "wood". | |||
===Nouns=== | |||
Apart from animacy, Kalyah nouns have a category of number, a simple singular/plural contrast for almost all nouns, but words for naturally paired objects have dual, which acts like plural. Verbs must agree with the animacy and number of its nouns. Kalyah nouns do not have a case distinction, but it has [[w:Obviative|obviation]] instead, where one of the two participants would be marked as proximate (whichever one was deemed more important), and the other marked as obviative. In some situations, like when a sentence contains an intransitive verb, obviative marking is omitted. This is also true of sentences with only one noun where the role of the noun is obvious from the personal marking on the verb. | |||
{| class="wikitable" | |||
! rowspan="3" | | |||
! colspan="2" |Inanimate | |||
! rowspan="5" | | |||
! colspan="2" |Animate | |||
|- | |||
| colspan="2" | "hammer" | |||
| colspan="2" | "woman" | |||
|- | |||
! Singular | |||
! Plural | |||
! Singular | |||
! Plural | |||
|- | |||
! Proximate | |||
| ''lom'' | |||
| ''lom'''''a''' | |||
| ''lom'''''in''' | |||
| ''lom'''''oi''' | |||
|- | |||
! Obviate | |||
| ''očč'''''a''' | |||
| ''očč'''''oo''' | |||
| ''očč'''''an''' | |||
| ''očč'''''one''' | |||
|} | |||
===Verbs=== | |||
Verbs mark aspect, mood, subject and object and have two categories: '''independent''' (in a main clause) and '''conjunct''' (used in subordinate clauses, with participles and question particles). | |||
[[Category:Languages]] [[Category:Settameric languages]] | [[Category:Languages]] [[Category:Settameric languages]] | ||