Grammar
This grammar is meant to be a plain-language guide to how Owens Valley Paiute works. Read one article at a time or follow the suggested path below.
OVP builds meaning differently from English. Instead of leaning on word order, it stacks prefixes on the front of a word and suffixes on the end to convey meaning. Once you learn the pieces, you can combine them to form sentences.
The building blocks
Did you know that with just 44 core words and these building blocks, you can form around fifty thousand different sentences?
A few ideas show up again and again:
- Near vs. far. Where English forces you to mark gender (he vs. she), OVP forces you to mark distance: whether the thing you're talking about is visible/nearby or out of sight/far. You'll see this on pronouns, on nouns, and even on possession.
- Free word order. Because suffixes mark who is the subject and who is the object in a sentence, word order is free. You can rearrange a sentence without changing its meaning.
- Sounds soften. When you add certain prefixes, the first consonant of a word changes (t→d, p→b, s→z, k→g). This is the fortis/lenis shift, and it's everywhere.
Suggested reading path
If you're a beginner, a good reading path is:
- Sounds and Spelling: how OVP sounds, how it's written, and how to read it.
- Verbs: how to say what you do, what you feel, and what happens.
- Pronouns: how to say who does it and who it's done to.
- Object Prefixes: how to mark the object of a verb.
- Nouns: how to name the people, animals, and things around you.
- Possession: how to say "my," "your," and "their."
- Building Sentences: how to put it all together.