this video by imshawn on the Ket language is really informative, but there are moments when he struggles to make sense of things and in so doing makes them seem far more alien than they are
the above screenshot is a perfect example where he says:
it is still absolutely insane, for me, to just look at it - just wow honestly
but i really do not think it is that bad
to break it down - the noun phrase "his tent" in Ket i might transcribe as:
daqu's
while a full thought of "his tent is not at the river" might be transcribed as:
seskara qu's bensan
these two examples seem to have almost nothing in common except for the morpheme qu's meaning "tent" - and, well, that is correct!
imshawn thinks that the loss of the possessive case marking on the noun is really bizarre, but i think that is almost certainly a misunderstanding of what is actually happening
Ket is a language for which verbs are central, it is also a pro-drop language where the pronouns can be considered implicit if the verbs are already marked for their agent and patient (which in Ket they usually are)
he lexes the Ket construction as:
RiverAtHis Tent NotIs
but what i see is actually multiple phrases with dropped pronouns!
so i think a lex like this might be more true to the underlying structure:
river at, (it is) his - (a) tent - not (there) (it) is
if you imagine Yoda saying it, it makes perfect sense
that is right: that pesky pro-drop is doing its thing again!
but, we are also seeing something else which is kind of related to pro-drop, often termed the "zero copula" - basically leaving out the verb "to be" (or its various forms in English like "is")
we see that in the parenthetical "it is" in my lex, and according to some quick research i turned up a paper which confirms there is no copula in Ket present-tense constructions thus we would expect to see "two juxtaposed noun phrases" in this context without a copula
the sentence is not even that weird, and it is not all that different from Middle English except that English uses prepositions, while Ket uses affixes on the verb
so there we are, Ket - still a beautiful and interesting and sadly endangered language - but one that is not so alien after all!
i recently did a similar exercise with Egyptian pronouns and i might do more of these in the future
also here is a Grammar of Ket if you want to learn more about it and of course imshawn's video is still a fantastic introduction to the history and culture of the Ket people!
(note also that the parenthetical "there" in my lex is (1) a demonstrative pronoun and (2) mostly an artifact of English grammar which i included to improve understanding, but is not needed in most languages)
