LESSON TWO — Separator Words

You've learned that the basic Ceqli sentence structer is SVO, that is, subject-verb-object.

fawl da bwa pani. the bird drinks water.
pamo dorm cwaq. the father sleeps (in) the bed.

In that second sentence, a basic principle of Ceqli is terseness. The verb dorm
doesn't really have an object, it's an intransitive verb. In cases like that, the space
of the direct object can be taken by any word that makes sense. Even in English,
"Father sleep bed" is perfectly clear, though not regular English grammar. Of course,
it's also permissible to say:

pamo da dan cwaq dorm.

A word about da — the reason for the word is to mark the end of the subject
phrase and the beginning of the verb phrase. Ceqli has lots of compound words,
and da and some other words act to prevent two words from sounding like
compounds. In the first sentence, fawl da bwa pani, we have a literal
translation of "Bird it drinks water." There's a remote danger that fawl bwa
will be heard as fawlbwa which might mean "drink in the fashion of a bird"
or something of the sort. Consequently, the da is used as necessary to
prevent that. However in written Ceqli, the separation is indicated by a
space in the text, so it would seldom be useful to use the da when writing.

But what about pamo da dan cwaq dorm. ? What's to prevent us hearing
compounds like dancwaq (an inside bed?) or cwaqdorm (to sleep in a
bed fashion?) or even dancwaqdorm (meaning who knows what)? The
answer is that there are other 'separator words' in Ceqli. For example, the
two articles in the last lesson, to and te. So, you can break up
dancwaq with one of those.

dan te cwaq in a bed
or
dan to cwaq in the bed

But what about pamo da dan te cwaq dorm. How do we keep cwaqdorm
from being understood. Well, we have another separator word, sa, and it
basically means that the words before it modify the words after it.

pamo da dorm father sleeps, but how does he sleep? He sleeps in a bed,
so we express that with:

pamo da dan te cwaq sa dorm.

So we've added three separator words to make the Ceqli sentence absolutely
unambiguous. We don't need to, for the most part, in written Ceqli, and we
can leave them out in spoken Ceqli unless we're afraid of being misunderstood.

We can call such words GW's (grammar words) because they don't have
'meaning' themselves, but show the relationship of other words.

Go on to Lesson 3

Return to Lesson 1

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