Losu le xwá sqwóqwiyel

Losu le xwá sqwóqwiyel means ‘He becomes green‘.

Audio: Elizabeth Herrling

Vocabulary and Structure

This phrase has the following structure:

Notes:

• Losu means and so. It is based on osu (which means the same thing), but losu may contain a reduced form of the auxiliary le or la (see next point).
• Le is an untranslatable ‘auxiliary’ or ‘helper’ verb. It’s role is uncertain, it may be a reduced form of lam – to go.
• Xwa – become. You could also translate this as ‘it comes to be that…‘.
• Sqwóqwiyel – become green, turn green (this is a variant of tsqwóqwiyel)

Note that the meaning ‘he‘ is not expressed explicitly. You understand that ‘he’ is the subject from context, and in other contexts the sentence could be interpreted with a different subject.

You could also explicitly add a word for he, tútl’o, like this: Losu le xwa sqwóqwiyel tútl’o. But in context it is more normal for the Elders to leave the subject just understood.