Awa Pit

Lately, I've been digging in the linguistic mines of Awa Pit, a South American language which has a feature with the fear-inducing name of conjunct-disjunct. The core concept is actually quite simple. If you are familiar with any non-English European language, you have come across conjugations - in French je chante, tu chantes, il chante, in Spanish canto, cantas, canta, in German ich singe, du singst, er singt. Even English conjugates, just barely, I sing, you sing, he sings. The good news? In Awa Pit, there is one conjugation marker per I/you/he sit.

This marker is best explained by analogy. If this worthy poster wrote a note saying "Gone fishing." and placed it on your fridge, you would interpret the sentence as "I have gone fishing." If this poster, however, sent you a text "Gone fishing?", you would interpret the question as "Have you gone fishing?" In other words, the English punctuation provides enough context without the pronouns "I" and "you" to interpret the sentences. Awa Pit, as a language of the South American jungle, is seldom written down, and therefore uses suffixes at the end of verbs to indicate this distinction.