A Little Kahtsaai

I've been churning through sketches and modifications in the last year, resulting in the current rather full language, Kahtsaai. A lot of the work is based on Bixwá, which in turn was the outcome of several sketches. It became clear that Bixwá was getting cognitively unwieldy for my purposes, so I stepped back. I generalized some of the ideas a bit. In particular, I ditched the instrumental prefixes in favor of full-on noun incorporation, with instrumental significance one use available for that (Mithun's type IV NI). This cleaned things up a bit.

I dropped case marking altogether, with one marginal exception. Semantically inanimate nouns are marked when they are the subject of a transitive verb. The verb subject prefix for an inanimate noun is also different. So, in both case marking and verb conjugation, inanimates follow an ergative alignment (mostly), while animates are nominative-accusative:

he-nop

3IN-fall.over

it fell over

kí-tá-nop-im

3IN.TRANS-1SG-fall.over-CAUS

it knocked me over

The language is far enough along that I can complain about the recent weather and environmental conditions:

Ááni	tá-wime	he-tsaaiki-koh	to'pe-yo-se'á
lately	1SG-eye	3IN-itch-INST.APPL	spruce-LNK-wind
lately my eyes have been itching from allergies

Noun-noun compounds have a link syllable joining elements (an idea probably most recently inspired by Coast Tsimshian). Incorporated nouns are abbreviated in various ways, most regularly, but a few have particular incorporation stems. So, I could have rephrased things a bit:

Ááni	tei-wim-tsaaiki-koh	to'pe-yo-se'á
lately	1SG-eye-itch-INST.APPL	spruce-LNK-wind
lately my eyes have been itching from allergies

Notice that the incorporated noun, wime, has been reduced to just wim-. You will also see that Kahtsaai has an instrumental applicative to bring in a new argument. There is also a benefactive applicative, as well as a fossilized locative applicative that is not freely productive.

So far I have omitted evidential marking, which is usually marked:

tówaar	mós	heweitaraa'ánméín
tówaar	mós	he-wei-taraai-án-mé-n
meanwhile	tomorrow	3IN-very-state-hot-FUT-EVID
it's supposed to be very hot tomorrow

Here we have a hear-say evidential, somewhat merged with the future marker (Kahtsaai is usually aspect obsessed, not marking tense except for the future). The discourse particle tówaar marks a discourse break, especially a change in topic.