Kinship terms

Kashaya has a complex, interconnected set of words that refer to family relationships, or kinship. They always include information about the person who stands in the relationship. This possessor is expressed by a prefix, and sometimes also a suffix (especially for "my"). Ten important relationships also have an informal term, similar to "mom, dad" rather than "mother, father".

Here are the basic forms with the root ki for "older brother", in Subjective case.

See the separate discussion of the ways of marking the person involved in the kinship relation.

Many of the meanings expressed by these words are different from those in English, and they are often more detailed than the equivalent English words. Thus the special root ki for "older brother" is different from the term for "younger brother". The kinship terms often depend on the specific way in which you are related to another person, including whether your grandparent is through your mother or father.

See a full presentation of the meanings of the various kinship roots.

Finally, a fundamental part of the kinship terms is that they take different case forms: this means that they occur with different endings that depend on their function in the sentence. Most of these can occur with the meaning "my", illustrated here.

Notice that the ending -nʔ seen previously is actually the first-person subject marker, and changes partly or completely in other case forms. There's another case form, the comitative, that doesn't occur with the first person; and the vocative (for speaking directly to someone) only occurs with the first person. This gives us a slightly different list for the forms with "your".

See the separate discussion of the meanings and forms the various kinship cases.