Ne' ne haya'tí haksa'aa hanôkek ne kanöhsa'ôwe kahatakô.
There was a little boy who lived all alone in a house in the forest.

haksa'aa  ::  (he is) a boy

This word is composed of: ha- "he", -ks- "child", -a'aa "be small".  This type of word is called a "verbal noun".  We call it this because it has the form of a verb, but it is typically used in a sentence as a noun.
Literally, this word means "he is a small child", but most often we translate it as "boy".

Since this word is technically a verb, we can change the prefix to change who is the child:

keksa'aa  --  I'm a child
seksa'aa  --  you're a child
haksa'aa  --  he's a child; a boy
yeksa'aa  --  she's a child; a girl
kaksa'aa  --  it's a child; a child

We can combine the words we've learned so far into sentences of the following type:

Ne' ne haksa'aa haya'tí.  --  The boy is alone.
Ne' ne yeksa'aa yeya'tí.  --  The girl is alone.

With this new set of "child" words, we see a slightly different prefix pattern, compared to the Agent-C pattern we saw with the words for "be alone".  Here's the pattern:
 

ke-	I
se-	you
ha-	he
ye-	she
ka-	it

The only difference here is that we have ke- instead of k-, and se- instead of s-.  The other three prefixes, ha-, ye- and ka-, are exactly the same as with the Agent-C pattern. We'll call this new prefix pattern the Agent-X Pattern.

Now that we know these two patterns, we can learn why they're different. If we look at the two stems we've learned so far, -ya'tí "be alone" and -ksa'aa "be a child", we can see an important difference between the two. That first stem,  -ya'tí, starts with a single consonant sound, -y-.  The second stem, -ksa'aa, starts with a cluster of two consonants, -ks-.  It turns out that there is a general rule in Mingo that stems which begin with a single consonant take the "C" Pattern, while stems that begin with a cluster of consonants take the "X" Pattern.

The reason for this has to do with the sound patterns of the language.  For example, if we try to attach the Agent-C prefix forms k- "I" and s- "you" to stem -ksa'aa, we get the following:

* kksa'aa
* sksa'aa

Neither of these are possible words in Mingo.  You can never have a double consonant like -kk- in Mingo, and you can never have the sequence -sks- in a word.  To prevent these impossible sequences of sounds, Mingo uses the prefix forms ke- "I" and se- "you" here instead.  Thus, even though it looks like it's more complicated to have to remember two different patterns of prefixes, the differences in the prefixes make the words easier to pronounce.

Here is a summary of the two prefix patterns we have seen so far:
 

	Agent-C	Agent-X
I	k-	ke-
you	s-	se-
he	ha-	ha-
she	ye-	ye-
it	ka-	ka-

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