| Lesson 1 — The five familiar vowels | |
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| Samala and the other Chumash languages have six vowels: | |||
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five that you're familiar with | ||
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one that may be unfamiliar | ||
| When you write them phonetically, the five familiar vowels of Chumash are spelled very much like those of Spanish — and many languages other than English. | |||
The five familiar vowels are:  a
e i o u |
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| The article ma / ha with nouns |
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For the sake of simplicity, the nouns on these pages — words such as pat "nest" and nono "grandfather" — stand by themselves. |
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| In regular speech, most nouns show up with the article ma or ha. It's tempting to use the term "article" when talking about ma and ha, but they are more like signals telling you that the next word is a noun. | ||
| ma appears when a noun stands alone or is at the beginning of the phrase: | ||
 ma
tomol |
"a canoe / the canoe" | |
| ma
tip |
"salt / the salt" | |
| Otherwise, ha introduces a noun when it is not the first element of the phrase: | ||
| skumu
ha tomol |
"four canoes" | |
| This topic is discussed in more detail in lesson 2. | ||
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