Klallam Grammar

4 Nouns and Articles

Articles and nouns go together. Nouns can usually be thought of as words referring to people, places, or things. In English articles are small words that precede nouns. In English the articles are ‘the,’ ‘a,’ ‘an,’ ‘this,’ ‘that,’ ‘these,’ and ‘those.’ The articles that point directly at some noun, like ‘this,’ ‘that,’ ‘these,’ and ‘those,’ are also called demonstratives.

A noun phrase is a noun with its article. In an English noun phrase the article precedes the noun as in ‘the deer,’ ‘a deer,’ ‘an elk,’ ‘this deer,’ ‘that deer,’ ‘these deer,’ and ‘those deer.’

In the Klallam language, articles precede nouns just as in English. However, there are important differences.

First, in English an article is sometimes not required to make a grammatical sentence, as in ‘I saw deer.’ In English we could also say ‘I saw a deer,’ ‘I saw the deer,’ and so on. In Klallam, however, every noun must have an article.

A second difference between English and Klallam articles is that Klallam has many more articles than English. This section introduces a few of the most common basic Klallam articles. The other demonstrative articles will be covered in §53. A complete list of the Klallam demonstratives can be found in Appendix C.

The third difference is that the English and Klallam articles do not always match in meaning. For example, there is no article in Klallam that exactly matches the meaning and use of ‘a’ or ‘the’ in English.

 

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