PARTICLES AND LINKING WORDS

SA AS A TOPIC MARKER

One of the uses of sa in Demlutu is marking the topic of the sentence, which is mandatory in almost all types sentences. It comes after the word or constituent that is considered the topic. When the topic has more than one word, it is normal to add a comma.

• Lu sa dem inglish. (I speak English)
• Maria at Juzef sa, lu non kema dint puwey lokal su su kampa. (As for Maria and Joseph, I don’t know where they live)

Temporal and location expressions can also be topicalized, but any prepositions that accompany them will be deleted.

• Matenan sa, lu sem juwa nuvo’s. (As for now, I am writing a new book)
• Tara pus sa, tubig kade. (As for this city, it is raining)

NOMINALIZATION WITH YAK SA

yak sa turns a constituent that comes before it into a noun, so that it can be used as the topic, direct object, subject, and many other syntactic functions that nouns can have.

• Lu puwawa juwa juwa dengan amik lu’s yak sa, lu praze. (I like reading books with my friend)

THE RELATIVE YA

The particle ya can be translated to English as that, who, and work as relative pronouns. They can also add additional information to the noun (akin to a dash in English).

• Tu ga sem juwa, ya lu puwawa mantena. (You wrote the book that I am reading now)
• David, ya heroy. (David — the Hero)
• London, ya taradel de Grambretanya. (London — the capital city of the United Kingdom)

NEGATION

The most common method to negate a sentence in Demlutu is adding non before the verb. It sometimes gets reduced to n’, especially in colloquial speech.

• Tu non dem Demlutu u fluente. (You don’t speak Demlutu fluently)
• Lu n’ praze puwawa juwa juwa. (I don’t like reading books)