We have created a lot of sentences using "I" ("ņra") as the subject. What about using other pronouns? How to say "we", "you", "she" in Pwekish?
Let's have a look at the pronouns we commonly used in Pwekish. We classified them into 3 categories, first person, second person and third person.
| Pronoun | Pronunciation | Meaning | First Person |
|---|---|---|---|
| ņra | /ŋra/ | I, me | |
| ņris | /ŋris/ | we, us (including the listener) | |
| ņos | /ŋos/ | we, us (excluding the listener) | Second Person |
| ntyu | /n̩ˈtɕu/ | you (singular) | |
| ntyus | /n̩ˈtɕus/ | you (plural) | Third Person |
| nrow | /nrow/ | he, him; she, her; it | |
| nrows | /nrows/ | they, them |
Pwekish verbs conjugate with the subject of the sentence. This means that the word for action changes if a different person does the action. For action done by first person (i.e. I and we) the verb remains unchanged. But for second person and third person, the first letter of the verb changes according to a fixed set of rules. This is so-called the Personal Verb Initial Mutation (abbreviated as PVIM).
PVIM is a very important concept in Pwekish, because if you want to say something as simple as "he sees me", you need to know how the verb conjugates to make it grammatically correct, just like the "like" changes to "likes" for 3rd person singular subject in English.
The main idea of PVIM is to add special prefixes to the verb to alter its pronunciation. There are 3 prefixes that is used for PVIM: "-h", "h-" and "n-". They are applied to the first letter of a word and changes the pronunciation of the letter.
Generally, we describe those 3 prefixes as following:
Notice that this is only true for some letters only.
Now, let's have a look on how the verbs we have learned changes under PVIM.
| 1st Person | 2nd Person | 3rd Person | to be |
|---|---|---|---|
| pe /pe/ | hpe /be/ | npe /me/ | to eat |
| dip /dip/ | ndip /nip/ | dhip /tip/ | to play |
| koko /ˈkoko/ | hkoko /ˈgoko/ | nkoko /ˈŋoko/ |
Do you see the pattern? Probably not, since we haven't introduced the 3 Letters Law, a powerful method to memories the conjugation rule of PVIM. In short, 3 Letters Law divides letters of Pwekish into groups of 3, and PVIM can be considered as shifting and choosing the right letter within the group. As PVIM is a complicated concept, we will go bit by bit in the next chapter.