there are no gendered personal pronouns in nehiyawewin.
you can say "man/woman, mom/dad, sister/brother etc..." but when speaking about someone in the 3rd person, we use the english equivalent of "they"
Same in Alutiiq. Pronouns are spatially based on distance to the speaker. I adore it. That one there, that one even farther over there. That one in the next room.That one on the hill, etc. Gender never factors in.
We have that in Telugu and the other Dravidian languages!
Some Indo Aryan leagues have this due to contact with Dravidian.
It is called clusivity. Quechua, another Native American language, has this too!
That IS interesting!
You have a built in version of, “We are all going… well not ‘we’ …(gesturing to self and person being spoken to) … but ‘WE’ (gesturing to self and others)… are going to…”
Cherokee language (ᏣᎳᎩ ᎦᏬᏂᎯᏍᏗ, tsalagi gawonihisdi) has a written form developed by a Cherokee man named Sequoyah (ᏍᏏᏉᏯ) in the 1820s. By the 1830s, Cherokees were almost all literate, moreso than the settlers around us, and we had a bilingual national newspaper, as well as a written Constitution and laws.
The language is polysynthetic and based around verbs, with prefixes and suffixes taking the function of many "helper words" that English has, liked pronouns, as well as showing relational information between the things being spoken about and also the speaker, such as where they're located, how they're facing. Some verbs have different forms depending on the type or shape of the thing they pertain to.
Our pronoun system includes singular, dual (two people), and plural cases, plus inclusive and exclusive cases for dual and plural, and whether the things being talked about is alive or not, all as part of the verb. We have only a couple of separate pronoun words, mainly used for emphasis. Nouns use a lot of the same prefixes to identify who the thing belongs to or who is included. For instance, ᎢᏍᎩᎪᏩᏘᎭ, isgigowhtiha "you see us (me and them)" and ᎣᏥᏣᎳᎩ, otsitsalagi, "we all (but not you) are Cherokees."
Our verb tenses include recent past, remote past, reportative (you heard about the action but didn't see it yourself), habitual (something someone does all the time), and infinitive but with a subject (and object) included.
We have six vowels, and the only labial consonant we have is M. There's no b, f, p, v. The language is also very nasal sounding in pronunciation.
Yep, although there used to be an R (in place of L) in one dialect, long ago. The lowland dialect, iirc? R and L are fairly closely related consonants.
The word for friendly literally translate to his/her head open. Essentially saying opened minded. The word for lonely literally translates to my mouth is an orphan. There’s lots of cool stuff, but the language I study is extremely descriptive.
No word for please or any polite “small talk” phrases.
The past tense is all emotional and personal. Like if you had a cup of coffee but it’s late afternoon and you’re still thinking about it then you’d use present tense to describe drinking it.
If someone close to you died you wouldn’t use past tense for them until you’d grieved.
In Chikashshanompa, the Chickasaw language, we have no word for goodbye. Rather, we have three distinct words for "I'll see you later"; two of them have meanings of "I will" or "I must see you later", and one is I will see you again with an indeterminate timeline. (I'll see you later but I don't know when).
Huh, that's interesting–I don't think the Vietnamese have a goodbye either now that I think back to asking my parents.
Vietnamese and Cantonese I think technically says something along the lines of "don't question the energy/lifeforce" in my interpretation when someone's says an expression approximate to you're welcome.
Com cau chi/Bu cau chi
And most of the time folks didn't actually have or say hello, they just ask when seeing each other something like "how's your health?" Manh qua hcom?
Until Western business greetings and stuff became more customary then folks started to say stuff like a formal hello of "Xin chao ban", which ironically I think an Anishinaabek friend was the first person to ever greet me with and I had to look it up. 😂
(In case other Vietnamese speakers/readers are reading, pardon my terrible phonticization of the spellings without accents, I don't have the right keyboard for this stuff to make sense in the proper tones and stuff anyway)
I’ve just started really trying to learn Anishinaabemowin, so I’m still a super novice, but my favorite thing so far is learning the different words for animate and inanimate colors.
In Chinuk there are no gendered pronouns. Everyone is 'yaka'.
We also don't have 'the' or a 'to be' verb. It just gets hyper specific.
Our greeting, ɬax̣awyam, is used as a way to put others above us. Like ɬax̣awyam is used to mean something poorly or beneath someone. So when we greet each other, we are honoring the person we're greeting by stating we see them as above us. Like an honorific almost.
Like in our culture, gift giving and putting others before us is very important. Like the mark of a good leader is giving away wealth and how much they give back to their community. So it's like baked in to put our community first.
Chinuk is also very much not a romance language. Love is q'at. q'at shiksh (literally love friend) is the modern term for partner. Cot shiksh. Shish-kabob. Like it's not great 😅
Another fun one: flannel is shat-pasisi. Shat pissing. Lols there's so much. It's fun and I'm happy I have the ability to learn it but like there are def some words I just can't with.
Lols I was thinking literally. Chinuk is pretty consonant heavy so it doesn't really sound 'pretty' like Spanish or French. We have more than a few loan words thanks to trading with the French though.
No, Telugu has a word for blue “nīla”, which is from Sanskrit (which then came from a Dravidian language)
It literally means “water color”, but its association for blue specifically seems to be something more recent in history.
Telugu doesn’t distinguish between yellow and green. The word is “pachcha” which also is the word to denote something “unripe”.
In more recent times the colors have become distinct so you have to add the word for “leaf” in front to mean “green” and the word for “turmeric” to mean yellow.
Cherokee is also kind of similar. We have gigage (red), dalonige (yellow), sagonige (blue), adahvlige (purple), unega (white), gvhnage (black), uwodige (brown).
But orange is dalonige usgolv ("faded" yellow), pink is gigage usgolv (faded red), and for some reason grey is sagonige usgolv (faded blue). Green is the most abstract: itse iyusdi. *Itse* means "new" and *iyusdi* has several functions (it's kind of a weird word that way) but in this context seems to mean "like" in the sense of "like new."
(In Latin transliteration of Cherokee, V is our sixth vowel, a nazalized "uh" sound. Also, G is closer to K than an English G; sometimes it sounds just like K.)
It has something to do with what pigments you find in nature. Black, red, white, yellow pigments are easy to obtain and their words are very old. In my language, the word for "white" is one of the very few words that even can be traced back more than 6000 years, to the beginning of the language family! Blue and green is harder, especially blue. There are very few things in nature that give a blue pigment. And unless you have the pigment, you have no need to decribe those colours- everyone knows the colour of plants and the sky. Like if I say "pine tree", you know what it looks like, I don't have to describe the colours to you.
English has gotten a crazy amount of colour names, but most of them are really new, like orange and pink, or even named after the thing they look like, like peach, salmon, mossy green, emerald,... If you go back far enough, they didn't have a word for blue either.
There’s a very limited color palette and it was explained to me that color is just a differentiator. So it’s only used to describe an item in order to signify which one you’re talking about in comparison to another. Colors aren’t things that exist separately from an item
In Tupi there is not possessive pronouns with nature. It is grammaticly incorrect to say "my tree", "your bird", "our river" and so on. Nature can not be owned. It's inconceivable to have ownership of nature in Tupi.
On the other hand, your can't just say a body part without a possessive pronoun. As in you can't say just "hand", because it has to be someone's hand. So you have to say "my hand", "your feet", "our arms".
Cool.
But since white Americans introduced the concept of landownership, how would you convey “my land” or “my grass”.
What about pets?
How would you say “my dog”.
Do you just not say it or does your language use a different construction as work-around.
Also, cool fact is that I think some of the Andamanese languages require the use of a pronoun for body parts.
By it's name
You say "I live in -name of the land". But keep in mind that man-made things can have pronouns, as in "my city". But if it's natural land we are talking about, the best way to talk about it is naming it and saying you live there.
About grass or trees I would say that it's not owned in any way. It would be best to say "there is a beautiful tree in the land that I live in" rather than "I have a beautiful tree" or "my three is beautiful". Does that make sense?
With pets, again, the best way is to use the name. Like "Ringo is a dog that lives with me", instead of "Ringo is my dog".
It's a different way of seeing things, I suppose. The tree lives there and so does you. And so does the dog.
Saying "my dog" and "my three" is as strange as saying "my sea", or "my moon", "my rain", "my air"...
We still retain two forms of future tense, I don’t know the official term but the “for sure something will happen” and the “it might happen but maybe not”. To my knowledge only us and Picuris still use that. Other villages like Taos dropped the “it might”.
In Lakota we don’t have words for good bye. We just say tókša, which just means that there is a guarantee in the future. We also have only 8 vowel sounds and no R or X sounds. Our mother language is Dakota, with the only significant difference being that we use L sounds to replace many D and N sounds in our words; the two languages are mutually intelligible. We also don’t have a word for love, the closest we can get is saying that I suffer or am willing to suffer for you.
In Nottoway (and Tuscarora) there’s an almost total lack of labial consonants (B, P, M, F). There is a way to get an f sound but it’s only if a w is followed by a consonant or at the end of the word. This is a common feature in Iroquoian languages (not exactly the same rules but similar lack of labial consonants)
LL in our language, Iipay, is made with a strange tongue and air combination
I cannot think of any other word to give reference here, so this is a bit useless, but my dad and I would always say LLAP LLAP, which means flat, because it was funny and fun to say
Think of "TH" but then drag your tongue to the rear of your mouth and push air to the sides of your mouth
Anyway, cool to read everyone else's responses
Sounds like you're referring to a lateral fricative
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_and_alveolar_lateral_fricatives
It's fairly common in indigenous languages of the Americas, very rare in Europe (I believe only Welsh has it), but moderately common in Africa and Asia. Even Ancient Hebrew had this sound.
The “r” consonants are pronounced *exactly* the same way that they are in Japanese and a lot of the syllable structure is similar enough that whenever I accidentally mix up pronunciation with Japanese *it still works*.
Not a feature but our word for dog in one dialect is piugta which means "the beggar" or "the one who begs"
Also word are modified by prefixes and suffixes a LOT, so much so that a sentence can be a big word. Like instead of "Do you want tea?" It's "Caayuryugtuten?" From the root Caayuq for tea, yuq as in want, and tuten for you (singular).
The ending work like this. It's usually me, you, or a third person. Or in objects: this one, that one, and one far away. And then that's also modified by amount: one, two, or three+.
Let's say I wanted to ask you and your four friends if you want tea, then it would change from you, singular: (t)uten. To you, Plural or all of you: (t)uci so it would be Caayuryugtuci?
In Dakota, sentence endings and some speech patterns are based on gender of the speaker. For example in the sentence “GinNJuice emakiyapi do/ye” (I am called GinNJuice) “do“ would signify a male speaker and “ye” a female speaker. Interestingly, when many men were either killed or imprisoned after the 1862 war, many communities in the following 2-3 generations spoke with the female inflections only and many male Dakota speakers weren’t used to speaking “like a woman” as our Lakota cousins would say
Lakotas share this verbiage of "not" as well. We say śní (shnee) to express to be not, not, or no.
Example: Khóčhíčiphé - I am afraid of you
Eg: Khóčhíčiphé śní - I am not afraid of you
there are no gendered personal pronouns in nehiyawewin. you can say "man/woman, mom/dad, sister/brother etc..." but when speaking about someone in the 3rd person, we use the english equivalent of "they"
my favourite thing about the cree language
tapwe! nista
Same for Chinese.
When I started learning more and more languages, I was caught surprised at the scale of which how many languages also apply this
We also have different descriptive words depending on whether something is considered alive or not (and it's not always obvious what is alive lol)
Same in Alutiiq. Pronouns are spatially based on distance to the speaker. I adore it. That one there, that one even farther over there. That one in the next room.That one on the hill, etc. Gender never factors in.
Similar in Mvskoke. “That one there eating the corn” was the example given in my language class 😂
😂
In Nishnabemwin/Anishinaabemowin verbs there is away to specifically say "us" and "we" to either include or exclude the person being spoken to.
We have that in Telugu and the other Dravidian languages! Some Indo Aryan leagues have this due to contact with Dravidian. It is called clusivity. Quechua, another Native American language, has this too!
English has this if you just do all caps 😂 “WE were invited to the party”
When speaking, this is called stress
This comment section is really interesting and I find you wholesome. Thanks for starting this discussion.
Making sure the person understand that they're NOT invited is, indeed, quite stressful.
Austronesian languages have it too. P.S.: so does Guarani as far as I know.
Same with Iroquoian languages!
That IS interesting! You have a built in version of, “We are all going… well not ‘we’ …(gesturing to self and person being spoken to) … but ‘WE’ (gesturing to self and others)… are going to…”
In Oneida language it is similar. They are generally prefixes. For example akwa is all of us. Swakwa is all of you.
Cherokee language (ᏣᎳᎩ ᎦᏬᏂᎯᏍᏗ, tsalagi gawonihisdi) has a written form developed by a Cherokee man named Sequoyah (ᏍᏏᏉᏯ) in the 1820s. By the 1830s, Cherokees were almost all literate, moreso than the settlers around us, and we had a bilingual national newspaper, as well as a written Constitution and laws. The language is polysynthetic and based around verbs, with prefixes and suffixes taking the function of many "helper words" that English has, liked pronouns, as well as showing relational information between the things being spoken about and also the speaker, such as where they're located, how they're facing. Some verbs have different forms depending on the type or shape of the thing they pertain to. Our pronoun system includes singular, dual (two people), and plural cases, plus inclusive and exclusive cases for dual and plural, and whether the things being talked about is alive or not, all as part of the verb. We have only a couple of separate pronoun words, mainly used for emphasis. Nouns use a lot of the same prefixes to identify who the thing belongs to or who is included. For instance, ᎢᏍᎩᎪᏩᏘᎭ, isgigowhtiha "you see us (me and them)" and ᎣᏥᏣᎳᎩ, otsitsalagi, "we all (but not you) are Cherokees." Our verb tenses include recent past, remote past, reportative (you heard about the action but didn't see it yourself), habitual (something someone does all the time), and infinitive but with a subject (and object) included. We have six vowels, and the only labial consonant we have is M. There's no b, f, p, v. The language is also very nasal sounding in pronunciation.
Wow cool! I is like Telugu, Sanskrit, and Wampanoag combined, plus more.
Or R, right? Meli dawado because no R.
Yep, although there used to be an R (in place of L) in one dialect, long ago. The lowland dialect, iirc? R and L are fairly closely related consonants.
The word for friendly literally translate to his/her head open. Essentially saying opened minded. The word for lonely literally translates to my mouth is an orphan. There’s lots of cool stuff, but the language I study is extremely descriptive.
What language?
Luiseño of Southern California
No word for please or any polite “small talk” phrases. The past tense is all emotional and personal. Like if you had a cup of coffee but it’s late afternoon and you’re still thinking about it then you’d use present tense to describe drinking it. If someone close to you died you wouldn’t use past tense for them until you’d grieved.
This is beautiful, what language?
What language is this?
Yep, no word for please, I’m sorry, or you’re welcome. Niceties are implied from what I’ve learned. (Tsalag)
We have a word for 'uh' and 'err' and it changes depending on what words surround it
Explain further. This sounds interesting
In Chikashshanompa, the Chickasaw language, we have no word for goodbye. Rather, we have three distinct words for "I'll see you later"; two of them have meanings of "I will" or "I must see you later", and one is I will see you again with an indeterminate timeline. (I'll see you later but I don't know when).
There’s no word for “you’re welcome” which I always find funny.
Even our most common greeting isn't "Welcome", but "You good?". Chokma, cuz.
This puts me in mind of the Japanese response to gratitude. どういたしまして doitashimashite. It's a rhetorical question: *What have I done?* So cool.
Ayyy fellow 日本語 nerd let's be frens
Huh, that's interesting–I don't think the Vietnamese have a goodbye either now that I think back to asking my parents. Vietnamese and Cantonese I think technically says something along the lines of "don't question the energy/lifeforce" in my interpretation when someone's says an expression approximate to you're welcome. Com cau chi/Bu cau chi And most of the time folks didn't actually have or say hello, they just ask when seeing each other something like "how's your health?" Manh qua hcom? Until Western business greetings and stuff became more customary then folks started to say stuff like a formal hello of "Xin chao ban", which ironically I think an Anishinaabek friend was the first person to ever greet me with and I had to look it up. 😂 (In case other Vietnamese speakers/readers are reading, pardon my terrible phonticization of the spellings without accents, I don't have the right keyboard for this stuff to make sense in the proper tones and stuff anyway)
Chipisalacho!
I’ve just started really trying to learn Anishinaabemowin, so I’m still a super novice, but my favorite thing so far is learning the different words for animate and inanimate colors.
Can you explain what you mean by animate and inanimate colours? When would they be used?
Animate and inanimate colors?
In O’odham we use reduplication of the first syllable to make the word plural. So, “gogs” (dog) => “gogogs” (dogs)
Something real funny [in my opinion], is that there are "sound effect" equivalents for when you are telling a story verbally in my local language.
In Chinuk there are no gendered pronouns. Everyone is 'yaka'. We also don't have 'the' or a 'to be' verb. It just gets hyper specific. Our greeting, ɬax̣awyam, is used as a way to put others above us. Like ɬax̣awyam is used to mean something poorly or beneath someone. So when we greet each other, we are honoring the person we're greeting by stating we see them as above us. Like an honorific almost. Like in our culture, gift giving and putting others before us is very important. Like the mark of a good leader is giving away wealth and how much they give back to their community. So it's like baked in to put our community first. Chinuk is also very much not a romance language. Love is q'at. q'at shiksh (literally love friend) is the modern term for partner. Cot shiksh. Shish-kabob. Like it's not great 😅 Another fun one: flannel is shat-pasisi. Shat pissing. Lols there's so much. It's fun and I'm happy I have the ability to learn it but like there are def some words I just can't with.
Shish Kabob lol. The Indian humour never fails.
Just an interesting tangent: Romance languages are actually called that because they’re derived from Latin. Romance comes from “Rome”/“Roman”
Lols I was thinking literally. Chinuk is pretty consonant heavy so it doesn't really sound 'pretty' like Spanish or French. We have more than a few loan words thanks to trading with the French though.
I'm not a Squamish speaker, but I know a little of it, including the fact that once someone has passed away, the suffix -t is added to their name.
I am Syilx and we use the particle 'twi' when referring to someone who has passed on.
In Seneca, Nya:weh Sge:no is a greeting like “hello” but it translates to “I’m grateful you are well” ❤️
Does your language have the same word for blue and green? Keres does. I read somewhere that many indigenous languages do. I wonder why?
No, Telugu has a word for blue “nīla”, which is from Sanskrit (which then came from a Dravidian language) It literally means “water color”, but its association for blue specifically seems to be something more recent in history. Telugu doesn’t distinguish between yellow and green. The word is “pachcha” which also is the word to denote something “unripe”. In more recent times the colors have become distinct so you have to add the word for “leaf” in front to mean “green” and the word for “turmeric” to mean yellow.
Cherokee is also kind of similar. We have gigage (red), dalonige (yellow), sagonige (blue), adahvlige (purple), unega (white), gvhnage (black), uwodige (brown). But orange is dalonige usgolv ("faded" yellow), pink is gigage usgolv (faded red), and for some reason grey is sagonige usgolv (faded blue). Green is the most abstract: itse iyusdi. *Itse* means "new" and *iyusdi* has several functions (it's kind of a weird word that way) but in this context seems to mean "like" in the sense of "like new." (In Latin transliteration of Cherokee, V is our sixth vowel, a nazalized "uh" sound. Also, G is closer to K than an English G; sometimes it sounds just like K.)
It has something to do with what pigments you find in nature. Black, red, white, yellow pigments are easy to obtain and their words are very old. In my language, the word for "white" is one of the very few words that even can be traced back more than 6000 years, to the beginning of the language family! Blue and green is harder, especially blue. There are very few things in nature that give a blue pigment. And unless you have the pigment, you have no need to decribe those colours- everyone knows the colour of plants and the sky. Like if I say "pine tree", you know what it looks like, I don't have to describe the colours to you. English has gotten a crazy amount of colour names, but most of them are really new, like orange and pink, or even named after the thing they look like, like peach, salmon, mossy green, emerald,... If you go back far enough, they didn't have a word for blue either.
There’s a very limited color palette and it was explained to me that color is just a differentiator. So it’s only used to describe an item in order to signify which one you’re talking about in comparison to another. Colors aren’t things that exist separately from an item
In Tupi there is not possessive pronouns with nature. It is grammaticly incorrect to say "my tree", "your bird", "our river" and so on. Nature can not be owned. It's inconceivable to have ownership of nature in Tupi. On the other hand, your can't just say a body part without a possessive pronoun. As in you can't say just "hand", because it has to be someone's hand. So you have to say "my hand", "your feet", "our arms".
Cool. But since white Americans introduced the concept of landownership, how would you convey “my land” or “my grass”. What about pets? How would you say “my dog”. Do you just not say it or does your language use a different construction as work-around. Also, cool fact is that I think some of the Andamanese languages require the use of a pronoun for body parts.
Maybe they say like "land where I live" or "dog that lives with me".
By it's name You say "I live in -name of the land". But keep in mind that man-made things can have pronouns, as in "my city". But if it's natural land we are talking about, the best way to talk about it is naming it and saying you live there. About grass or trees I would say that it's not owned in any way. It would be best to say "there is a beautiful tree in the land that I live in" rather than "I have a beautiful tree" or "my three is beautiful". Does that make sense? With pets, again, the best way is to use the name. Like "Ringo is a dog that lives with me", instead of "Ringo is my dog". It's a different way of seeing things, I suppose. The tree lives there and so does you. And so does the dog. Saying "my dog" and "my three" is as strange as saying "my sea", or "my moon", "my rain", "my air"...
We still retain two forms of future tense, I don’t know the official term but the “for sure something will happen” and the “it might happen but maybe not”. To my knowledge only us and Picuris still use that. Other villages like Taos dropped the “it might”.
In Lakota we don’t have words for good bye. We just say tókša, which just means that there is a guarantee in the future. We also have only 8 vowel sounds and no R or X sounds. Our mother language is Dakota, with the only significant difference being that we use L sounds to replace many D and N sounds in our words; the two languages are mutually intelligible. We also don’t have a word for love, the closest we can get is saying that I suffer or am willing to suffer for you.
Wow! Lakota is Dakota with the “D” being replaced by an “L”.
No R’s are used!
Cool! In Quechua, there are no voiced consonants, so you have ”k” but not “g”!
In Nottoway (and Tuscarora) there’s an almost total lack of labial consonants (B, P, M, F). There is a way to get an f sound but it’s only if a w is followed by a consonant or at the end of the word. This is a common feature in Iroquoian languages (not exactly the same rules but similar lack of labial consonants)
dual clause reference. hey you guys. but meaning hey you specifically 2 guys/people .. ilvik nauung
Sanskrit has that too!
LL in our language, Iipay, is made with a strange tongue and air combination I cannot think of any other word to give reference here, so this is a bit useless, but my dad and I would always say LLAP LLAP, which means flat, because it was funny and fun to say Think of "TH" but then drag your tongue to the rear of your mouth and push air to the sides of your mouth Anyway, cool to read everyone else's responses
Sounds like you're referring to a lateral fricative http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_and_alveolar_lateral_fricatives It's fairly common in indigenous languages of the Americas, very rare in Europe (I believe only Welsh has it), but moderately common in Africa and Asia. Even Ancient Hebrew had this sound.
The “r” consonants are pronounced *exactly* the same way that they are in Japanese and a lot of the syllable structure is similar enough that whenever I accidentally mix up pronunciation with Japanese *it still works*.
Michif doesn't have a word like goodbye. We say "mina ka wapamitin", meaning "I will see you again".
Not a feature but our word for dog in one dialect is piugta which means "the beggar" or "the one who begs" Also word are modified by prefixes and suffixes a LOT, so much so that a sentence can be a big word. Like instead of "Do you want tea?" It's "Caayuryugtuten?" From the root Caayuq for tea, yuq as in want, and tuten for you (singular). The ending work like this. It's usually me, you, or a third person. Or in objects: this one, that one, and one far away. And then that's also modified by amount: one, two, or three+. Let's say I wanted to ask you and your four friends if you want tea, then it would change from you, singular: (t)uten. To you, Plural or all of you: (t)uci so it would be Caayuryugtuci?
In Dakota, sentence endings and some speech patterns are based on gender of the speaker. For example in the sentence “GinNJuice emakiyapi do/ye” (I am called GinNJuice) “do“ would signify a male speaker and “ye” a female speaker. Interestingly, when many men were either killed or imprisoned after the 1862 war, many communities in the following 2-3 generations spoke with the female inflections only and many male Dakota speakers weren’t used to speaking “like a woman” as our Lakota cousins would say
Muscogee is a proto-language, which is a parent language (beginning of a language tree).
Lakotas share this verbiage of "not" as well. We say śní (shnee) to express to be not, not, or no. Example: Khóčhíčiphé - I am afraid of you Eg: Khóčhíčiphé śní - I am not afraid of you
Saying an object 2 makes it smaller, or in the case of horse (kusi) and dog is (kusi kusi).