Kaltxì! And welcome to Lesson 1 of Learn Na'vi Grammar the Easy Way.

Ok so to start, let's talk about how words fit together to make sentences.

Word Order

In English, there is an order which words have to go in order for the sentence makes sense:

people eat vegetables.

It's clear here who is eating what because of the order. We always put who is doing the eating first, then eat and then what is being eaten. Because of this word order telling us this information of who's eating who, we don't need to change the words themselves. we just put them in their place. If you mix up the words, the meaning completely changes:

vegetables eat people.

This has the opposite meaning as above.

In Na'vi, there is more freedom. This means that the word order doesn't matter as much. Because of that, we need to change the words themselves ever so slightly sometimes in order to keep track of who is eating and what's being eaten. Therefore:

aysutel yom ayfkxenit .

and

ayfkxenit yom aysutel .

are equal in meaning. This also means that

ayfkxenìl yom aysuteti .

and

aysuteti yom ayfkxenìl .

are equal in meaning but these two senteces mean the opposite of all the four sentences above them.

Some Stuff

So you may have noticed that the Na'vi words above are these:

• aysutel
• aysuteti
• yom
• ayfkxenìl
• ayfkxenit

aysutel and aysutet come from aysute (people) which is several tute (person).

yom is eat

ayfkxenìl and ayfkxenit come from ayfkxen (vegetables) which is several fkxen (vegetable)

As you may have noticed, these words have either l , ìl , it , or ti on the end. This is, as described above, how we keep track of who's eating what. We put stuff on the end.

notice:

• All the words that have these endings are always either a Person, Place, or thing.
• yom is a word listed as type vtr. in the LearnNavi.org dictionary. ONLY words listed as vtr. (or sometimes vtrm.) can be used with these endings.

l and ìl are the same. There are two of them so there is a choice to use which one flows the best. Only use ìl on words that end with consonants (like n, t, p, k, kx, ng for example.), and l on words that end with a vowel (like, a, ä, e, i, ì, o, u). These are put on the thing which is doing the action. Here, the thing that is doing the eating.

ti and it are the same. Use it on words that end with consonants, and ti on words that end with a vowel. These are put on the one that is receiving the action. Here, the thing that is being eaten.