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Lesson 6: Questions

How to Use This Lesson

This lesson is divided into four sections. Please move through them in this order: Grammar, Vocabulary, Practice, Flashcards.

Do not try to memorize! Just read through the content attentively. The warm-ups and flashcards will bring the vocabulary back later!

Questions

Today we will learn how to ask questions! The first type of question, yes/no, is very easy. We just change the intonation to that of a question:

fasu i mouje en bo.
  ↓       ↓       ↓       
sibling  drinks  at home    

fasu i mouje en bo? (intonation rising up)
 ↓       ↓        ↓       
sibling  drinks  at home?

To answer, you can say um (no) or ia (yes). You can also add those to the end to make it more explicitly a question, like this: 

fasu i mouje en bo, ia? 
 ↓       ↓        ↓       
sibling  drinks  at home, yes?

For other types of questions, we add words in the beginning. The first one, and most important, is ce, which means what.

fasu i mouje.
  ↓        ↓                 
sibling  drinks   

ce fasu i mouje?
 ↓    ↓       ↓          
what sibling drinks?

If he is drinking milk, one may reply something like moulu, e moulu, i mouje moulu, or hay i mouje e moulu.

Notice that sometimes you may want to specify whether you are asking about who is doing something, or who something is being done to. In that case, you use the marker before the questions, like this:

e ce i mouje? = what is being drunk?
a ce i mouje? = what is doing the drinking?

Ei means person. If you want to know who is drinking milk, we ask cei, or what (ce) + person (ei)

Try to ask who drinks milk, and then respond it's your brother.

Dom means place, location. To ask about location (where), we use cedom, or what (ce) + place (dom)

Try to say: "Where does the sibling drink?", and then reply: "At home".

In sum, to ask questions, we add in the beginning of the sentence:

ce - what?  
cei - who?   
cedom - where?

Now try to create 3 questions:

The BO Subclusters

Remember what BO indicated?

Click to check

BO = house.

A subcluster narrows that broad domain. Look at the groups below and see if you can spot the narrower patterns.

Oravia English
bortal door
borcai wall
borlu window
bospupi shower
bosvi toilet
bosvi boelori restroom / bathroom

What do you think the words in the BOR subcluster have in common?

How about BOS, any ideas on that?

Let's take a look at another table.

Oravia English
boelori room
boetale hall
boemo kitchen
bonjae cabinet
bonfene bed
bontame table

What do you think the words in the BOE subcluster have in common?

How about BON, any ideas on that?

🌍 Sound Connections

Tal means "door", coming from Persian طاق ṭāq (arch, doorway) and Hindi ताला tālā (lock, door mechanism).

Lu means "outside", coming from Latin lux (light, sky phenomenon); Italian luce; French lumière; Portuguese/Spanish luz; and Proto-Indo-European *lewk- (to shine).

Vi is for "internal body", like Latin viscera.

And pupi is mimicking the sound of falling water :).

Here's another word with this root:
lupupi = rain (outside + falling water), just like bospupi = shower (bathroom + falling water).

That's why we have:
anolu = out (movement away + outside), just like borlu = window (house structure + outside).

Great job!

One other general BO word is bofi = inside.

In sum, in the BO cluster (house), we have:

BOR - structural  
BOS - bathroom   
BON - furniture
BOE - rooms / locations

We learned an interesting word here, boemo, which means kitchen. Do you notice anything in this word? You know what MO means, and we just learned BOE. Wait a minute...

boe +  mo  = kitchen
 ↓     ↓                
room  food

Sound Connections

Yes, that's right! Kitchen means food room. And boemo is actually not a special word: many are like this! That's because not only the first syllables have meaning: others can, too. The more words you learn, the more you discover the syllable-meaning associations, and the easier it gets! At some point not too long from now, you may be guessing the meaning of words you haven't seen before and creating your own words. :)

Ps. Other words you've already learned are also composed of sounds that have meaning in Oravia, just like boemo. You knew what MO means, but you may not know what the meanings of these other sounds are yet. As you learn more words, these syllable-meaning associations will become intuitive. I won't be telling you what these associations are: this is for you to discover as you learn more vocabulary. Happy exploration!

Matching Games

Time to practice! Match the Oravia words with their English meanings. Use sound-meaning associations as clues. For example, the subcluster sound tells you the category, even for words you haven't seen before.
If you don't remember or make a mistake, that's totally fine! We will have plenty of opportunities to practice. Right now just give it a try.
Click one word from each column to match them. The game will check automatically when you select both words.

Round 1

Round 2

Round 3

Round 4

Round 5

🎉 Lesson 6 Complete!

Use the Flashcards tab for another quick review.

Come back tomorrow for Lesson 7.