Kâte is a Papuan language spoken by about 6,000 people in the Finschhafen District of Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea.
The name Kâte means 'forest', an epithet for the inlanders on the tip of the Huon peninsula, excepting the people living along the Mape River (Flierl and Strauss 1977).
The indigenous glossonyms referred to smaller linguistics units that can be called dialects.
McElhanon (1974: 16) identifies five dialects at the time of earliest mission contact in 1886, each named according to how they pronounce a common word or phrase.
However, McElhanon (1974) notes that final glottal stop is barely phonemic in the Wemo dialect, but corresponds to a wider variety of syllable-final consonants in Western Huon languages (-p, -t, -k, -m, -n, -ŋ), which are neutralized (to -c, -ŋ) in the Eastern Huon languages, including Kâte.
Both Pilhofer (1933: 15) and Flierl and Strauss (1977) describe the labiovelars q and ɋ as coarticulated and simultaneously released [kp] and [gb], respectively.
(The letter ɋ is a curly q with hooked tail that cannot properly be rendered if it is missing from system fonts.)
Like nouns, free pronouns can also occur with directional affixes and case-marking postpositions, as in no-raonec 'from me'.
The free pronouns can also be appended to nouns to indicate A free pronoun coreferent with the head noun frequently marks the end of a relative clause and the resumption of the matrix sentence, as in: ŋicmanmonda-oMonday-onware-weccome-3SG.FPSTe3SGʒirahereminotfo-wecsleep-3SG.FPSTŋic monda-o ware-wec e ʒira mi fo-wecman Monday-on come-3SG.FPST 3SG here not sleep-3SG.FPST'the man who came on Monday did not stay here'.
The latter suffix resembles the invariable -ne that turns nouns into adjectives, as in opâ 'water' > opâ-ne 'watery', hulili 'rainbow' > hulili-ne 'rainbow-colored', hâmoc 'death' > hâmoc-ne 'dead', or fiuc 'theft' > fiuc-ne 'thievish' (Pilhofer 1933: 49).
(Schneuker 1962: 31)Each finite independent verb is suffixed to show tense and the grammatical person of the subject.
(1933: 36)A small class of adverbial intensifying affixes can be added before final inflectional suffixes (Pilhofer 1933: 81-82).
'Below are some Kâte (Wemo dialect) reflexes of proto-Trans-New Guinea proposed by Pawley (2012):[4] FPST:far past SIM:simultaneous SR:switch-reference