Pronouns

Kashaya
Grammar

This page gives the basic pronouns in Kashaya. They occur in three case forms, which have been given various names, but this website generally uses the first terms in each instance since they are what Oswalt uses.

Subjective: nominative, subject, agent, actor
- used most often for the subject of a verb
Objective: accusative, direct object, patient, undergoer
- used for the object of a verb or postposition
- used for the subject of a verb it is an undergoer rather than an actor
- also for inalienable possession
Benefactive: oblique, indirect object
- used with the meaning "for (someone)"
- also for alienable possession

There is a difference between male and female only for the third-person singular.

Description	Translations	Subjective	Objective	Benefactive
First-person singular	I, me, my	ʔa (ʔa·)	to (to·)	ʔkʰe
First-person plural	we, us, our	ya	yal	yaʔkʰe
Second-person singular	you, your	ma	mito	miʔkʰe
Second-person plural	you, y'all, your	maya	mayal	mayaʔkʰe
Third-person singular male	he, him, his	mu·kinʔ	mu·kito ~ mu·bal	mu·kinʔkʰe
Third-person singular female	she, her	manʔ	ma·dal	ma·daʔkʰe
Third-person plural	they, them, their	ma·caʔ	ma·cal	ma·caʔkʰe
Third-person coreferent	referring to same third-person	ti (ti·)	tito	tiʔkʰe

Three of the short pronouns can occur with a long vowel; this is always possible, but it is required when the pronoun occurs by itself or when followed by a clitic. The word for "him", mu·kito, can be freely replaced by mu·bal with no change in meaning, but it is not frequent.

The objective forms all end in either /to/ or /l/, and the benefactive uniformly ends in /ʔkʰe/; these can be seen also in the kinship system. Note that mu·kinʔ and mu·kito fully consist of recognizable parts: demonstrative mu· "that one", masculine -ki, and subjective -nʔ or objective -to. Third-person "they" has the underlying form /mac·ac/, so the final /c/ is realized in a glottalizing context as /cʼ/. The word manʔ has an underlying long vowel (the root is /ma·d-/) and patterns that way for stress placement, which usually shifts rightward to the next location. Since second-person plural maya is based on the short singular root ma, that first syllable is not skipped for stress placement as it is in longer stems like mito.

The "coreferent" category, which Oswalt calls reflexive, is used when the reference is to someone who has already been mentioned, as discussed here in more detail.