Lesson 1.2: Your First Sentences

introduction

Welcome to part two of the first Na'vi Survival Guide lesson series: Basic Sentence Building

In part two, we will explore the other components that make up a simple sentence. By the end of this lesson, you should expect to be able to do the following:

• Identify the subject of a sentence
• Identify the object of a sentence
• Create complete Na'vi sentences using the subject and object

Take advantage of the review sections at the end of each lesson to practice and reinforce the skills you're learning, and join us on Discord for even more practice. Click the right arrow or press the right arrow key to navigate to the next section in this lesson!

subjects and objects

When you approach Na'vi with a background in English, one of the first hurdles to overcome is Na'vi's "relative free word order." Simple English sentences will always be structured using the following basic components: subject, verb, and object.

• The subject is the "doer" of the action of a sentence.
• The action of a sentence is called the verb.
• The object is the person, place, or thing that is being affected by the verb.

The role of the subject or object in an English sentence is indicated instead by its position relative to the verb in the sentence. Simple English sentences will always be structured in subject, verb, object (SVO) order. Because of this, in a sentence like "Jake eats teylu" it's clear who is eating who.

subjects and objects continued

In Na'vi, word order is not fixed to (SVO) order because nouns are modified with noun case endings: an additional sound added to the end of a subject or object which indicates its role in the sentence. This allows for more flexibility in structure, with up to six configurations that would allow a sentence like "teylu eats Jake" (OSV) or "eats Jake teylu" (VSO) to still be understood as "Jake eats teylu" (SVO). Let's take a look at how this works.

The first two case endings we are going to address are called the agentive and the patientive.

the agentive case

The agentive case is used to indicate the subject of a sentence in a transitive construction. The agentive suffixes are listed below:

the patientive case

The patientive case is used to indicate the object of a sentence in a transitive construction. The patientive suffixes are listed below:

constructing simple sentences

The following sentence is a complete Na'vi sentence in SVO word order. The subject, verb and object are marked with their respective case endings. TapHover over the Na'vi words for a translation:

All together, this sentence translates as I eat fish, with the words arranged in the same word order that we would see in an English sentence. Now, let's take a look at how we can rearrange the order of the words without changing the meaning.

constructing simple sentences continued

Thanks to the flexibility of the language, this sentence can be arranged in one of six ways in Na'vi:

In this example, our subject oe takes the agentive case ending as the subject of the verb. The verb yom remains unmodified, and the object payoang takes the patientive case ending as the object of the verb. Because of this, no matter where these nouns fall in the sentence, the sentence can be understood as "I eat fish."

summary

The subject is the "doer" of the verb of a sentence.
You can identify the subject by asking "who is doing what" about a sentence.
The object is the person, place or thing affected by the verb of a sentence.
You can identify the object by asking "who is doing what to what" about a sentence.
Subjects are marked with the case endings -l or -ìl if there's both a subject and object present. -l for vowels, -ìl for consonants.
Objects are marked with the case endings -ti/-t or -it. -ti/-t for vowels or consonants, -it for consonants.
Because of these case endings, Na'vi has relative free word order.

review

Complete the following sentences to check your retention of the terms learned so far! Confirmation will appear when the correct answer is entered.

practice

Mark each noun with the correct ending. Remember: subject is orange, object is purple, and verb is blue. You can hover over unfamiliar Na'vi words to see their meaning. If you have issues with the accented ì or ä, longpress the key on your mobile device keyboard, or copy-paste the letter.

practice

For these final exercises, use the provided Na'vi words to create the English sentence.

conclusion