In past lessons, we’ve focused on how to describe people and things in a positive way — like “I am hungry” or “The woman is a singer.” Now it’s time to flip that! In this lesson, you’ll learn how to say what you’re not — like “I’m not hungry” or “The woman is not a singer.”To create these sentences, we’ll learn about the Negative Marker “Ti” and how to use it to make negative statements. This post includes lesson notes, example sentences in Chamorro, audio pronunciations and a Quizlet Deck for supplementary practice. Happy studying!

Contents
Introduction to “Not” in Chamorro The Negative Marker Ti Practice Drills With “Ti” Example Sentences: “I am not hungry” How to Describe “It” In Chamorro Make Your Own Sentences Wrapping Up: Keep Practicing on Quizlet! Keep Learning! Continue to the Next Lesson

Introduction to “Not” in Chamorro

In this lesson, we will learn how to make negative statements, such as “The coffee is not hot” or “I am not tall.” The two concepts we will learn for making these kinds of sentences in Chamorro are:

1. The Negative Marker “Ti”
2. Vowel Harmony
3. Order of Words

Let’s start by learning about the Negative Marker “Ti”.

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The Negative Marker Ti

In Chamorro, the Negative Marker “Ti” is a small word that translates to “not”. It is used by placing it in front of a word to indicate that something or someone is not that word.

In this lesson, we will practice using it with Adjectives and Nouns, to make phrases such as “not hot” or “not water.”

Since the word ti has an “ee” sound, using this negative marker means that the word following after it must change according to Vowel Harmony Rules. If you would like a review of these rules, please see my Introduction to Vowel Harmony lesson notes.

Now that we’ve learned about this negative marker, let’s do some drills to practice using it.

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Practice Drills With Ti

When using the Negative Marker Ti, we will just put it in front of whatever word we want to negate. We will follow this structure:

ti + word

As a reminder, the word following the Negative Marker Ti must also adhere to Vowel Harmony Rules, if applicable to that word. To practice using the negative marker ti, let’s make some basic phrases in the table below:

Chamorro	English
ti maolek	not good
ti kariñosa	not friendly
ti guaguan	not expensive
ti a’paka’	not white
ti hanom	not water
ti Amerikånu	not American

Now that we’ve done some practice drills, we will make complete sentences in the next section.

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Example Sentences: “I am not hungry”

In this section, we will start to create complete sentences such as “I am not hungry” or “We are not tall.” To do this, we take our phrases from the previous section and put a Yu’ Type Pronoun after it. The specific word order we will follow is shown below:

Ti + [Adjective or Noun] + Yu’ Type Pronoun

The table below has some example sentences:

Chamorro	English
Ti ñalang yu’.	I am not hungry.
Ti mames (gue’).	It is not sweet.
Ti lekka’ ham.	We (2 exclusive) are not tall.
Ti tinane’ siha.	They (2) are not busy.
Ti maolek hit.	We (2 inclusive) are not good.
Ti pulitikåt yu’.	I am not a politician.
Ti gayeru ham.	We (2 exclusive) are not cockfighters.
Ti mangnge’ (gue’).	It is not delicious.
Ti Chamoru siha.	They (2) are not Chamoru.
Ti Amerikånu hamyo.	You (2) are not American.

Special Note About 3+ People: All of our example sentences refer to 1-2 people. To get sentences to refer to 3+ people, the Plural Man- Prefix must be added to the noun or adjective. This prefix will be covered in an intermediate level grammar lesson.

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How to Describe “It” In Chamorro

If you notice, for the sentences Ti mames and Ti mannge’ in the sentence drills, I put the gue’ in parentheses. Why did I do this?

As one reader kindly pointed out in the comments, Chamoru is a contextual language. This means that in natural, spoken Chamorro, the phrases “It is sweet” or “It is not sweet” would be expressed simply as Mames or Ti Mames. The gue’ is not added to the sentence in the same way we would add the word “it” when expressing these sentences in English because in Chamorro, the “it” is understood through context.

I am so grateful to receive this correction and improve my notes, because my first Chamorro language teacher (who is a second-language learner) taught me that we must always put the word gue’ when referring to an “it”. Now I know that this is not correct. 🙂

Even though this may feel a bit uncomfortable at first for us as English speakers, it is good to practice this form to help our speech more closely match native and naturally spoken Chamorro.

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Make Your Own Sentences

If you would like to go beyond the practice drills and example sentences in this lesson, make sure to reference my list of 100 Adjectives in Chamorro to build your own drills and sentences. You can even look at other word lists that have nouns to practice making negative statements.

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Wrapping Up: Keep Practicing on Quizlet!

In this lesson we learned about the Negative Marker Ti and how to use it to make basic negative statements, such as “I am not hungry.” We also reviewed how Vowel Harmony Rules apply when using this negative marker.

Keep practicing the example sentences in this lesson with this Quizlet Deck as a supplementary study tool.

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Keep Learning! Continue to the Next Lesson

When you are ready to continue to the next lesson, click the link below and learn how to turn our statements into questions with the Question Marker “kao”.

Lesson 06: How to Turn Basic Statements into Questions – From “You are hungry” to “Are you hungry?”