Symmetrical Voice in Toúījāb Kīkxot

So I read an article about the Totoli language of Sulawesi today (For reference it is "Symmetrical Voice and Applicative Alternations: Evidence from Totoli" by Nikolaus P. Himmelmann and Sonja Riesberg). Interesting stuff, mostly focusing on how Totoli has significant features of both symmetrical voice languages (its own typology) and Philippine-type languages (a relative of the symmetrical voice languages of course). Some things I liked included the authors getting slightly annoyed with Philippinists (for assuming everything is like Philippine languages, I guess) and the general overall topic. I'm always looking for info about obscure languages of Indonesia. My general feeling is that it is really hard to find such info, especially online. A lot of the examples used seemed pretty natural to me as an Indonesian speaker, so I guess I do understand this applicative suffixes after all :p. I was interested that the benefactive/instrumental suffix (-kan in indonesian, -an in Totoli, for the actor voice) can have a iterative function...which is a function of the locative suffix (-i in both languages) in Indonesian. Or maybe I don't, as I didn't quite get what exactly their conclusion that there was a locative voice in opposition to an undergoer voice with a goal applicative suffix meant, though the proposal seemed reasonable enough.

Anyway, this reminded me a lot of Toúījāb Kīkxot and how it came to have the typology it has. When I was learning Indonesian I thought the voicing system of Indonesian (which I later learned is called symmetrical voice) was cool and a feature I didn't see often, if ever in conglangs (sure, austronesian alignment appears lots, but Indonesian is pretty much ignored by everyone so yeah). I also decided I wanted to do something with triconsonantal roots (but had no knowledge of Arabic at the time and no access into any materials, so we get what wonderful mess we have), but that's not super relevant right now.

Now, with my Indonesian grammar book (The Sneddon one, I highly recommend it), I saw that suffixes like -i and -kan could do cool things with objects and marking arguments. I didn't quite get it at the time (let alone know that these are called applicatives) but I decided that Toúījāb Kīkxot should have them too. Originally there were 2-3 (locative, "benefactive" and an optional patient), later I added a third instrumental/causative. They were pretty much as classic applicative suffixes, as far as I can tell, marking the role of the direct object (often raising the transitivity of the verb, requiring a change of verb form) or the subject in the undergoer voice. I'll cover what they actually do in another post, since the benefactive form is especially confusing, but that's how they came about. It's one part of the language I am really proud of, as it gives a very different flavor than English and can do some pretty cool things. Plus it really helps with focus and showing what is most important in a sentence.