láts’ kw’es ew léts’es o te sxélches

láts’ kw’es ew léts’es o te sxélches means ‘other (times) he just catches one’.

Literally it means ‘Other that his catch is just one’.

Audio: Elizabeth Herrling

Structure and Vocabulary

This phrase has the following structure:

• láts’ – other, different
• kw’es – that
• ew…o – just (both words can be used by themselves as ways of marking emphasis, but together they mean just)
• léts’es – one (see léts’e)
  

  one

• 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 are no explicit words for ‘time‘ or for ‘his‘ in this sentence, these are just understood from context, as is common in the language.