Lesson 1 — Sentences without verbs  

You don't necessarily have to use a verb to create a sentence in Samala.
Samala can be very terse at times, using minimal grammatical means to convey information. Some sentences have no verbs — which means that you don't have to know anything about tenses and verb conjugations in order to start speaking full sentences right off the bat.
It's very common to skip the verb "to be" and simply string two (or more) words together with "to be" implied.
One of the most basic — and the most useful — of such sentences is
suku heki?     "what is that?"
what's that?
  
    literally "what [is] that?"  
In normal speech, these two words are run together as  
  suk eki? "what's that?"
suku heki?
  
The English equivalent of the difference between these two expressions is "what is that?" versus the more colloquial "what's that?" Here are the two expressions contrasted:  suku heki? — suk eki?
The answer is a little more complicated than the question. Suppose you'd like to respond with "that's a boat." There are two additional things you need to know before you just string "that" and "boat" together."
There's a short word ka that introduces the operative word in such expressions. Keep in mind here that ka has more a function than a meaning; it might help to think of it as emphatic. But it does not mean the same thing as English "is."
that's a dog
  ka tomol heki "that's a boat"
that's a boat
    literally "ka boat [is] that"
ka tomol heki
  ka huu heki "that's a dog" that's a crow
ka huu heki
  ka muhu heki   "that's an owl"  
  ka a heki "that's a crow" ka a heki
You can also string these words together in the opposite order, in effect saying literally "that [is] a boat." This particular word order is actually the neutral order; when you put  tomol  first in  ka tomol heki  you're emphasizing "boat.".

Two forms of "that"
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The neutral word order is the Samala equivalent of "that [is] a boat," with the word for "that" first.
The only problem with this word order is that the word for "that" — heki — has a different form when it comes at the beginning of the phrase:  it's  kweki rather than heki, which is used only when it's not at the beginning of the phrase.
So you could say either that's a boat
ka tomol heki "that's a boat"  
or 
 kweki ka tomol "that's a boat"   kweki ka tomol
As you might have read on page two of this lesson, the word for "the" or "a/an" also has two different forms, ma when it's at the beginning of the phrase and ha elsewhere. There are several Samala words that have two forms like this, one initial and the other non-initial.
Here are the other example sentences from above with both word orders:  
  with kweki first with heki later  
that's an owl
  kweki ka huu ka huu heki "that's a dog"
  kweki ka muhu   ka muhu heki   "that's an owl"
  kweki ka a ka a heki "that's a crow"
kweki ka muhu
Here are a few other useful phrases for responding to questions. You'll find out later what the individual elements of these first two phrases mean.
inikamn "I don"t know"  
  inikamn hi no  "I don"t know" kuhu
  kuhu "who knows" — (an exclamation)  

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