title: Building Simple Sentences
tags: [grammar, syntax, sentences]

Building Simple Sentences

Once you understand pronouns, verbs with their suffixes, and nouns with their suffixes, you can build real OVP sentences and rearrange them freely, because the endings do the grammatical work that word order does in English.

Subject + verb

The simplest sentence is a subject and a verb:

Uhu tüka-ti → "He/she/it is (or was) eating." (subject pronoun)

To say who by name, use a subject noun with its -ii / -uu suffix (remember: nouns as subjects must have one):

Isha'-ii katü-ti → "The coyote is sitting." (nearby)

Pahabichi-uu mia-wei → "The bear will go." (far)

Adding an object

For "I am eating it," put an object prefix on the verb:

Nüü ma-düka-ti → "I am eating it (nearby)." (tüka softens to düka after ma-)

For a specific named object, keep the object prefix and add the object noun with -neika / -noka:

Nüü tüba-neika ma-düka-ti → "I am eating the pinenut."

Pahabichi-ii tüba-neika a-tüka-ti → "The bear is eating the pinenut (nearby)."

For something general, use -na on the object and drop the prefix:

Nüü paya-na hibi-dü → "I drink water." (water in general)

A complete transitive sentence has this shape, though, as you'll see, it doesn't have to stay in this order:

(Subject)-(subject suffix) + (Object)-(object suffix) + (object prefix)-(Verb)-(aspect suffix)

Isha'-ii tüba-neika ma-tüka-ti → "The coyote is eating the pinenut."

Word order is free

This is one of the most elegant features of the language. Because -ii marks the coyote as the subject and -neika marks the pinenut as the object, you can put the words in any order and the meaning holds:

Nüü tüba-neika ma-düka-ti

Tüba-neika nüü ma-düka-ti

Ma-düka-ti tüba-neika nüü

All three mean "I am eating the pinenut." Compare English, where order is much more important. "The bear chased the coyote" is not "the coyote chased the bear." In OVP the suffixes carry the roles, so speakers are free to order words for focus, rhythm, or emphasis.

A handful of complete sentences

From here, the Vocabulary section gives you more vocabulary to drop into these frames.