8 The Preposition and Word Order
Many languages have prepositions, but very few, if any, have as many prepositions as English. In fact, many languages of the world do not have prepositions at all.
Klallam has just one preposition, ʔaʔ. This is a very useful little word. It can be used to translate many English prepositions, but its most common use is in passive sentences where the verb ends in ‑təŋ or ‑nəŋ. Passive sentences will be covered in detail in a later section.
When we speak of word order we are referring to the order of verbs, noun phrases, and prepositional phrases in the sentence. The word order of a basic sentence in English has the subject noun phrase first, followed by the verb, and then the object noun phrase, as in:
The girl saw the boy.
subject verb object
In the second part of this section you will learn that the word order of a basic Klallam sentence is quite different from English.