lhi kw’es ew lhíxw o te sxélches

Lhi kw’es ew lhíxw o te sxélches means ‘sometimes his catch is just three’.

Audio: Elizabeth Herrling

Structure and Vocabulary

This phrase has the following structure:

• lhi – sometimes
• kw’es – that
• lheq – sometimes, often
• ew…o – just (both words can be used by themselves as ways of marking emphasis, but together they mean just)
• lhíxw – three
  

  three

• te – the
• sxélche (also pronounced sxélcha) – catch, what one catches (use this for talking about game or fish that you catch)
  

  hunting catch, what you caught

• -s – here, marks the presence of a possessor who is ‘third person’ (neither you nor me). In this case, the third person possessor is an understood ‘his’.

Note that there is no explicit word for ‘his’ in this sentence, the possessor is just understood from context, as is common in the language.