SENĆOŦEN: A Grammar of the Saanich Language

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 generally 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 SENĆOŦEN, articles precede nouns just as in English. However, there are important differences.

First, in English an article is sometimes not required in a noun phrase 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--the article is not required to make a noun phrase in English. In SENĆOŦEN, however, every noun phrase must have an article.

A second difference between English and SENĆOŦEN articles is that SENĆOŦEN has many more articles than English does. This section introduces a few of the most common basic SENĆOŦEN articles. The other demonstrative articles will be covered in §57. A complete list of the SENĆOŦEN demonstratives can be found in Appendix C.

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

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