…kw’es yeláwels x̲wém kw’el kyó

…that my car is faster

…kw’es yeláwels x̲wém kw’el kyó means ‘…that my car is faster’.

Literally it means: ‘…that more fast (is) my car’.

Vocabulary and pronunciation

• kw’es – that
• yeláwel – more (see yeláw)
• -s – the -s has several uses in the language, in this case it marks that there is a ‘third person’ subject (i.e. the thing we are talking about is not you or me). See futher notes on this ending below in this post.
• x̲wém – fast
• kw’el – my (you would normally say tel, but you use kw’el when talking about distant objects, or objects that exist as possibilities
• kyó – car

Audio: Elizabeth Herrling
Note: this is an edited selection from a longer phrase. The full phrase will be covered in a following post.

Structure

The structure of this phrase is as follows:

Note that Elizabeth adds an -s ending to yeláwel. There are several different uses for -s in the language, but in this case it marks the following:

• First, that this part of the sentence is not a main sentence (a sentence by itself), but a sentence that is part of a larger sentence.
• Second, that the subject of this sentence (in this case, the car we’re talking about) is a ‘third person’, meaning that it is not me (the speaker) or you (the person spoken to)

Whenever those two conditions hold, elders will add the -s ending somewhere in the embedded sentence, and in this case Elizabeth puts it on yeláwel. There is no English equivalent of this ending, so you can’t really translate it.