Yeláwel híkw te lá:léms te sqá:qs tútl’o John.

John’s little brother’s house is bigger.

Yeláwel híkw te lá:léms te sqá:qs tútl’o John means ‘John’s little brother’s house is bigger.’ (literally ‘More big (is) the house-of the little.brother-of John’).

Vocabulary and Pronunciation

This phrase combines:

• yeláwel híkw – bigger (lit. more big (is)…)
• Híkw te lá:léms te sqá:qs tútl’o John. – John’s little brother’s house is big.

Audio: Elizabeth Herrling
Note: For simplicity this audio has been edited to remove a repetition, which slightly affects Elizabeth’s pronunciation; the full audio for this same  phrase will appear in a later post.

Structure

The structure of this phrase is as follows:

Note:  you can use tútl’o for ‘he, him’, but in this sentence the closest translation for tútl’o is  ‘the.’  Literally, tútl’o John means ‘the John’. 

In linguistic terms:  in Halq’eméylem, proper names (like John) can require determiners (equivalent to English ‘a‘ or ‘the‘).  Tútl’o can be a pronoun (‘he, him‘), but here Elizabeth is using it as a determiner.