Ḵalat Yašhuatko

Compositions

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Ḵalat Yašhuatko is a strongly agglunitative language. It is an inflectionally, derivationally, and syntactically head-initial language of ergative/absolutive alignment. Analysis of vowels is based on the mora. Adjacent short vowels are written as a single long vowel (with macron above).

Verbs

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The Verb

The verb inflects firstly in person and number with [the agent] and then for tense. There are epenthetic processes between these morphemes that introduces allomorphs of both the tense and person affixes, but these processes are overwhelmingly dissimilative, and so accentuate the boundaries between morphemes, rather than diminish them.

The Tenses

The tense system is fairly straightforward. There is a Past, Present (unmarked), and Future tense.

The Aspects

Ḵalat Yašhuatko has Perfective, Imperfective, and Perfect forms for all tenses.

Mood, Voice, and Valency

Nouns

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The Case Marking

Nouns and Pronouns in Ḵalat Yašhuatko inflect for a variety of cases with agglutinating suffixes. Ergative, Absolutive, Dative/Oblique, Genitive, Associative, Instrumentative, Prolative, Locative, Ablative, Allative, and Equative.

The Noun

Nouns are moderately inflected; for number, definiteness, and case.

The Article

There is no indefinite article and definite article is a suffix which does not agree with its noun in any category.

Pronouns

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Ḵalat Yašhuatko has both free and bound pronouns, and allomorphs of the bound forms.

Adjectives and Adverbs

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Adjectives and Adverbs are conflated entirely in Ḵalat Yašhuatko. They come in three forms, discrete morphemes unto themselves, and those derived from either nouns or verbs. Multiple derivational morphemes can be present.

Adpositions

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Ḵalat Yašhuatko uses a system of Adpositional Correlatives, much like Irish's Prepositional Pronouns. These are simple, agglunating constructions formed firstly of a correlative, and secondly of an adposition/case marking. These can be analyzed by English phrases such as "into those", "for you", "on whose behalf?" or "beyond any of us"