Dear Pawl,

First of all, we hope you are doing well and are having a nice end of the year!

We had a discussion in the lì'fyaolo' about the following. In your Na'viteri post from 2011-04-05 you wrote about the sentence sweylu fwa nga kolä:

Slä nari si! This is not the most common use of English ‘should have’—i.e., the counterfactual one, as in: “You should have gone, but you didn’t, ma skxawng!” Rather, it’s more like, “You went, and in fact it was the right thing to do.” [...] So how does one say “should have” in the counterfactual sense? Zene maweypivey, ma eylan. 🙂 I’m working on a post about counterfactuals in general . . .

As we know, that post about counterfactuals came later and introduced zun ... zel ...

But the specific question of how to say "you should (counterfactually) have gone" was never specifically answered and it keeps coming up in the community as a point of confusion. So: is (zel) sweylivu zun nga kilvä correct? If so, is the zel obligatory or can/should it be dropped? Or is there some other construction?

Eywa ngahu!
ta 'Rrta sì Sngätsì sì Talisì sì Tantsyala sì Tekre sì Wllìm sì Zangtsuva sì Zik

Kaltxì ma eylan,

You’re definitely on the right track.

As you know, “should” in Na’vi is sweylu, which literally means, “it’s best (that).”

So “You should (counterfactually) have gone” is actually “If you had gone, it would have been better.”

From the rules we’ve seen, this is:

(1) Zun nga kilvä, zel sweylilvu. Turning it around:

(2) Zel sweylilvu zun nga kilvä.

But we also know that if the time of both clauses is the same, we can use the bare verb in the zel clause:

(3) Zun nga kilvä, zel sweylu. And turning that around,

(4) Zel sweylu zun nga kilvä.

Finally, in sentences like (4), we can omit zel in casual conversation to get:

(5) Sweylu zun nga kilvä.

So all of (1) through (5) are acceptable for “You should have gone.”

One wrinkle:

The above assumes that the “better” part was in the past: You didn’t go last year, and LAST YEAR it would have better if you HAD gone. But we could also mean that the better part is NOW: If you had gone last year, the situation would be better NOW. (There were negative consequences of the person’s not going that are affecting the present situation.) This changes (1) and (2) to:

(1’) Zun nga kilvä, zel sweylivu.
(2’) Zel sweylivu zun nga kilvä.

Note that there are no parallels to (3) and (4), since the verb in the zel clause can only go into the root form if the time of both clauses is the same:

(3’) *Zun nga kilvä, zel sweylu.
(4’) *Zel sweylu zun nga kilvä.

However, we can omit zel as in (5) to get:

(5’) Sweylivu zun nga kilvä.

If you have any further thoughts on this, please let me know.

And . . . HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO ALL!

ta P.