Wichita Language - Grammar and Morphology

Grammar and Morphology

Wichita is an agglutinative, polysynthetic language; meaning words have a root verb basis to which information is added, i.e., morphemes (affixes) are added to verb roots. These words may contain subjects, objects, indirect objects, and possibly indicate possession. Thus, surprisingly complex ideas can be communicated with as little as one word: For example, /kiyaʔa:csthirʔa:c/ means ‘one makes himself a fire’.

Nouns do not distinguish between singular and plural, as this information is specified as part of the verb. Wichita also does not distinguish between gender, which can be problematic for English language translation.

Sentence structure is much more fluid than English, with words are organized according to importance or novelty. Often the subject of the sentence is placed initially. Linguist David S. Rood, who has written many papers concerning the Wichita language, recorded this example, as spoken by Bertha Provost (a native speaker, now deceased) in the late 60s:.

The subject of the sentence is ancestors, and thus the sentence begins with it, instead of God, or creation (when.he.made.us.dwell). This leads one to conclude Wichita has a largely free word-order, where parts of the sentence do not need to be located next to each other to be related.

Wichita has no indirect speech or passive voice. When using past tense, speakers must indicate if this knowledge of the past is based in hearsay or personal knowledge. Wichita speakers also use a morpheme which amounts to two versions of “we”; one that includes the listener, and one that does not. Wichita also differentiates between singular, dual and plural, instead of the simpler singular or plural designations commonly found.