Huyu li?  -  Who are you? 

After sharing one's name and nationality with one another, it's time to discover a little bit more about each others background. This lesson deals with various interhuman relations and manners to describe these:

Paragraph 3.1 -  Na

In the previous sections the word na has popped up multiple times. It expresses a possessive relation between two nouns in the same manner the English word "of" does:

Depending on the context however, it is not always expressed whose the item is. When person A asks person B: "Who is that?", and person B answers: yu uma, literally: "she is mother", then it is obvious from the context, this refers to person B's mother and the utterance can be translated as "she is my mother".  Because of this context-dependency, the word na is not always expressed in combination with pronouns such as wa, li or yu.

Because of this, a simple question like yu uma ha? can be understood either as "Is she my mother?" or "Is she his mother?" or "Is she your mother?", all depending on the context. As a matter of fact, a sentence like yu uma na wa in a clear context denotes a certain amount of focus: "She is my mother" (and not yours or anyone else's).

Paragraph 3.2 -  X is Y

In the snippet of conversation above, Fatime mentions the relationship between her husband and her brother in law: "They are brothers". In order to express this, she simply puts the two words together: yunyo for "they" and bua for "brother". The same technique can be seen in the following phrases:

Paragraph 3.3 -  Nong

The word nong expresses negation. It can be translated as "no" or "not". It can be placed in between nouns in order to express "X is not Y"

In order to practice the use of na, the X=Y formula and nong, please make the following exercise: