Mai!

If I want to start a conversation in Kah, I would need to learn a phrase like “what is the weather today in your city?” which in Kah would be: “haya titom la dola na li nintau”.

Let’s break it down:

“haya” - which one? ha is used as question mark, ya is any inanimate object, so what object?

“titom” - weather; Let’s add the compounds to our vocabulary! “ti” means “above, up”, and “tom” is “to become”;

“la” - “be at”;

“dola” - “city” where “do” is “house, building”, so “do+la” means place with buildings!

“na” analogous to English “of”;

“li” is “you” as one person, singular in terms of grammatical number;

“nintau” - "today", where “nin” is root for sun or daylight, and “tau” means “now”, so “day+now” means today!

So we use 7 words, but we learned 5 more roots that are used in compounds! How cool is that!

Now when you read some text in Kah you would recognize those roots and guess the meaning which helps to eventually learn those as separate words. Let's see an example.

- hala yudo li la taula? (where is the house you are at the present?)

- tila singin (on top of a hill)

The only words you don't know are yu that is basically "he/she" or person marker (vs ya object); and singin which is a hill, sin means small and gin is mountain.

So now you could at least guess that ha-la is question about place, yu-do is some building, tau-la relates to time now, ti-la has something to do with above place, so you would look up above. The best part is that even if you don't know precise definition of those words you still can understand the context!

What's next? You just learn those new words and if you are forgetting their meaning the compounds are there to help you with a hint.

Om wayun!