navi1-3 Exercise 3: Oel ngati kameie ===================================== Parts oe-l I + agentive ending: the one who sees nga-ti you + patientive ending: the one who is seen kameie see (the verb; its infix is explained in Chapter 5) Who sees whom: I see you. Two other orders with the same meaning Ngati oel kameie. Oel kameie ngati. (Others exist; the verb is usually kept near the end, but the two endings are what carry the meaning.) Why Na'vi can reorder and English cannot In English, "I see you" and "You see I" depend on word order and on the pronoun forms I/me, you. Swap the words and the meaning changes (or the sentence breaks). In Na'vi each noun or pronoun carries its job on itself: -l marks the one who acts and -ti marks the one acted on. Because the job travels with the word, the word can move without changing who does what. English has almost no endings of this kind (only I/me, he/him and so on), so it relies on order.