SENĆOŦEN: A Grammar of the Saanich Language

39 Because

The previous section, §38, described how to ask why. This section covers how to explain why. There are many ways to answer ‘why’ questions. In fact, some why questions may take a long time to answer. Explanations may take an entire book. There are, however, a few basic patterns for short answers to ‘why’ questions.

English has a number of ways to give a short answer to a ‘why’ question. In English, for example, an answer to ‘Why did you go?’ could use the pattern ‘I went because I was tired’ or simply ‘Because I was tired.’ Or we could say ‘My reason for going was that I was tired’ or ‘I was tired was why I went.’

SENĆOŦEN has no word that translates exactly as ‘because,’ but it does have similar patterns for short answers to ‘why’ questions. In this section we cover two basic patterns that correspond to those English examples above.
 

This page has paths:

Contents of this path:

This page has tags:

Contents of this tag: