Kaihathenai

Kathenai is thelanguage spoken by the reptillian lizard-folk Salthan peoples. More info on the language, and the culture of the Salthan people can be found at the dikiesha foundation website

Phonology

Vowels
	a	e	i	o	u	ai

	Dental	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Click	ǀ	ǃ
Nasal	n
Stop		t  d		ɟ	k
Affricate		ts
Fricative	ð	s	ʃ			h
Approximant		ɹ
Lateral Flap		l

Grammer

Kathenai is a very agglutinative language. This means much modification of words is through affixes. Adjectives only appear as affixes. Except for plurals, an affix always modifies the thing that is directly after it.

An example list of affixes:

Gender	Male a-	Female i-	Neuter/Object e-
Time	Past kal-	Present i-	Future ne-
Parts of speach	Subject da-	Object tsi-	Transitive fol-	Verb -s	Question ki-

Word order

Generally the most "correct" word order is VSO (Verb, Subject Object), but because each part is marked, other words orders may be intelligible.

In cases when an object is handled between two people, the transitive form "fol-" is used. For example, "The man gave the stick to his dog" would be in Kathenai "Kalɘtɘs Dasana tsiukasan foluelkakat"

Possesives Possessive affixes come in two types, depending on the emphasis of the word in the sentence. The thing that is the emphisis will always be on the right side of the marker.

"-le-" is used when the subject or object of the sentence is the thing that is described as being possessed by something else ("the man's food", for example as opposed to the woman's food), and "-el" is used for when the subject or object of the sentence is described as possessing something ("The man with the food")

For example the nearly identical sentences "sekas daesila chisanaleseka" (I ate the man's food) and "sekas daesila chisanaelseka" (I ate the man who possessed the food) have very different meanings!

Questions

Questions always start with the prefix "ki-". Some example questions:

&nbsp	&nbsp
kiteha	What?
kikaine	When?
kigak	Why?
kirathe	Where?
kisana	Who?
kalkikis	What (did you) ask?

Adjetives Adjectives are simply affixes added just before the noun they are modifying. Some examples: ʃusaigadar - The red ball usergkeʃ - The small house.

Adverbs

Salthan does not have adverbs, or rather, they work just the same as Adjetives, modifying the verb instead. For example, Instead of saying "She sings beautifully" it would be rather rendered as salchais daesani, literally good-sing her.