Kaska language
| Kaska | |
|---|---|
| Dene Zágéʼ | |
| Native to | Canada |
| Ethnicity | 540 Kaska people in 2 of the 4 communities (2014, FPCC) |
|
Native speakers
|
15 in 2 of the 4 communities (2014, FPCC) |
|
Dené–Yeniseian?
|
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | kask1239 |
Kaska is a Northern Athabaskan language spoken by the Kaska people in the southeastern Yukon territory and northern British Columbia in Canada.
Kaska makes use of the vowels /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/, which, through various combinations of inflection (high, falling, and rising tone), lengthening and nasalization, produce about 60 vowel sounds in total.
Kaska is a polysynthetic language, commonly featuring sentence words. It is head-final, availing nine prefix positions to a given stem verb morpheme. Kaska does not mark for control or grammatical gender, the latter of which is often implied in narratives through contextual association with the prevalent gender roles of Kaska society, particularly with regard to warfare.
Verb-sentences, or single-word sentences consisting of a stem verb modified by inflectional, derivational and/or other types of affixes, commonly appear in Kaska. In these cases, a word-final verb morpheme may be accompanied by up to nine prefixes grouped into three categories: the disjunct, the conjunct and the verb theme. O'Donnell's Kaska verb structure diagram is shown below.
The verb theme carries the stem verb morpheme, which is immediately preceded by one of four classifiers (-h-, -Ø-, -l-, -d-).
The -Ø- classifier primarily marks intransitive and stative verbs.
The classifier -h-, referred to as ł classification in Athabaskan literature, marks transitivity and/or causativity and deletes when preceded by the first-person singular subject marking s-. Though it is found in some intransitive clauses, as in sehtsū́ts ("clothlike object is located"), these generally bear the -Ø- classifier.
The -d- classifier serves a more complex function, accompanying self-benefactives, reflexives, reciprocals, iteratives (marked by the prefix ne-) and passives.
The -l- classifier combines the functions of the -d- and -h- (ł) classifiers.
The conjunct, which appears between the disjunct prefix group and the verb theme, carries inflectional information including subject, direct object and mood/aspect markings. In subject markings, Kaska syntactically differentiates between "subject I" and "subject II" morphemes (the latter represented in the gray boxes in the table below to the left).
Subject I markers occur conjunct-finally, while subject II markers occur conjunct-initially.
The direct object markings are given in the table at right. The marking for third-person singular direct object depends on the subject of the sentence: if the subject is in first- or second-person, then it is Ø-, but becomes ye- when the subject is in third-person.
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