Elements of the Kato Language

In general structure all the Athapascan languages have great uniformity. The nouns, when not monosyllabic, are built upon monsyllables by suffixes, or are sentence verbs used as substantives. The verbs have adverbial prefixes expressing spatial relations, stems which often indicate the character and number of the subject or object, and suffixes with temporal, modal, and conjunctional force.

This general structure has been rather fully discussed in the treatment of the Hupa dialect (see LINCOM Americana 02), but, as said in another place, the Kato dialect differs from Hupa sufficiently to make them mutually unitelligible. While this is due chiefly to phonetic chnges, in a lesser degree it is due to differences in vocabulary, particularly nouns of describing meaning. The suffixes of the verbs also differ considerably. The elements which compose the words of each dialect are nearly all identical except for the phonetic changes which exist (from the introduction).