os lhéq’ su

os lhéq’ su means ‘used to’‘ or ‘(they) always used to’

Audio: Elizabeth Herrling

Vocabulary and Structure

This phrase has the following structure:

Notes:

• ósu is a general sentence connector, often untranslated but roughly meaning ‘so‘, or ‘and so‘.
• lhéq’ literally means ‘always’, but here carries the sense of ‘used to always’ or simply ‘used to’ (Elizabeth doesn’t do so here, but you can also add the past tense marker –elh, to make lhéq’elh – ‘used to‘, unambiguously past tense).
• Here, as is common, Elizabeth ‘splits’ the osu and inserts lhéq’ into the middle (possibly osu is really two words, though it is commonly written as one).