Tsʼixa language

Shua
Native to	Botswana
Native speakers	4,100 Shua and Tshwa (2008)
Language family	Khoe Kalahari (Tshu–Khwe) East Shua
Language codes
ISO 639-3	shg
Glottolog	shua1254  Shua tsix1234  Ts'ixa
ELP	Ts'ixa

Shua /ˈʃuːə/, or Shwakhwe, is a Khoe language of Botswana. It is spoken in central Botswana (in Nata and its surroundings), and in parts of the Chobe District in the extreme north of Botswana. There are approximately 6,000 speakers (Cook 2004). The term Shwakhwe means people (khwe) from the salty area (shwa).

Lexical Categories

Ts'ixa has the following word classes: nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs.

Nouns

Nouns in Ts'ixa possess inherent grammatical gender. Shua, like all Khoekhoe languages, has what is referred to as "Person-Gender-Number" or PGN markings (Hagman 1977), consisting of suffixes that attach to nouns and pronominal stems. These portmanteau morphemes indicate three persons (first, second, third), three genders (masculine, feminine, common), and three numbers (singular, dual, plural) (Fehn 2015).

However, the relation between PGN markers and personal pronouns varies across languages. In Ts'ixa, the post-nominal clitics marking nouns for gender and number are articles, rather than pronouns or obligatory noun class markers. These articles also indicate agreement on nominal modifiers such as adjectives and demonstratives, and can act as nominalizers when they attach to verbs or verb phrases. The PGNs are treated as enclitics in Ts'ixa, and not suffixes, because they attach to any element that occupies the final slot of a syntactic unit that acts as a definite noun phrase, and not just nouns and their modifiers (Fehn 2015).

The PGNs of Ts'ixa can be divided into two groups, ones that possess case-sensitive forms (singular and plural), and those that are not case-sensitive (dual).

Gender: Ts’ixa distinguishes three genders: masculine, feminine, and common. Common gender is only applied to human, or [+human], referents in dual and plural; non-human, or [-human], referents in dual and plural are marked for either masculine or feminine gender.

Adjectives:

Adjectives exhibit the following behaviors: they may precede the head noun, combine with a noun marked by the attributor morpheme ka, or act as an apposition to the head noun.

Adverbs:

Manner adverbs are derived from adjectives using the adverbializing clitic =sè. A subclass of adverbs are derived using locative pronouns, which typically consist of a demonstrative plus a locative formative. Bare noun phrases, adpositional phrases, and locative noun phrases derived with the nominalizer =xùà can function as adverbials (Fehn 2015).

Verbs

Verbs in Ts’ixa verbs can be grouped according to two features:

1) The number of core arguments they may take

2) The way they interact with TAM markers

They are further classified by their use of the grammatical morpheme referred to as “juncture” (Köhler 1981b) or “verbal linker” (Vossen 2010). This juncture morpheme links a restricted set of derivational and TAM suffixes to the verb stem, and serves as a connecting element in a specific type of multiverbal predicate.

Additionally, Ts'ixa has a closed class of copula verbs that behave differently than the other verbs in that they do not take TAM marking.

Intransitive Verbs can appear with a passive suffix, which gives an "impersonal" interpretation.

They can also take the reciprocal / polyadic suffix -kù, which gives it a "collective" interpretation.

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Verbal Derivation: there are 11 attested categories for verbal derivation in Ts'ixa, which are valence changing constructions or function as aspectual or directive modifiers (Vossen 1997; Fehn 2015).