“What?” is one of the quickest ways we gather information—What are you doing? What did you buy? What are you going to make? In this lesson, we’ll start learning Chamorro patterns for asking “what” questions with the word håfa (“what”). You’ll practice clear sentence patterns for using the question word “what” and how these patterns shift when talking about past, present and future actions. As always, this post includes Chamorro sentence drills, English translations and Chamorro audio narrations by Jay Che’le to support your learning. Happy studying!
Contents
- Introduction to “What” In Chamorro
- Asking About Past Actions: “What did you buy?
- Asking About Current Actions: “What are you buying?
- Asking About Future Actions: “What will you buy?”
- Lesson Summary
- Keep Learning! Continue to the Next Lesson (TBD)
- Documentation & Further Study
Introduction to “What” In Chamorro
In Chamorro, we use the word håfa to ask “what” questions. By itself, “Håfa?” means “What?”, but we can add more around the question to ask more specific “what” questions.
Chamorro has different ways to word “what” questions, but in this lesson, we’ll start with one of the simplest forms for asking about what was done.
Specifically, we’ll learn the patterns for asking the following types of questions:
- asking about past actions (“What did you buy?”)
- asking about current actions (“What are you buying?”)
- asking about future actions (“What will you buy?)
In the next section, we’ll start learning “what” questions for asking about what was done.
Asking About Past Actions: “What did you buy?
Now let’s start by learning how to ask “What did you buy?” We’ll be using Hu Type Pronouns and Transitive Verbs (a verb that requires us to do an action to something or someone else) in this form.
Before we jump into full sentences, let’s learn some key phrase chunks to get started:
| Håfa + Hu Type Pronoun |
| Chamoru | English |
|---|---|
| Håfa un… | What did you… |
| Håfa hu… | What did I… |
| Håfa ha… | What did she/he… |
| Håfa ma… | What did they… |
| Håfa in… | What did we… (exclusive) |
| Håfa en… | What did you… (plural) |
| Håfa ta… | What did we… (inclusive) |
Then we will take these word chunks and make “what” questions. All we need to do is add a transitive verbs after our phrase chunk:
| Håfa + Hu Type Pronoun + Transitive Verb |
To keep things simple, we’ll practice with the phrase chunk Håfa un (“What did you…”) in the sentence drills below:
| Chamoru | English |
|---|---|
| Håfa un cho’gui?1 | What did you do? |
| Håfa un sångan? | What did you say? |
| Håfa un fåhan? | What did you buy? |
| Håfa un kånnu‘? | What did you eat? |
| Håfa un sodda‘? | What did you find? |
| Håfa un li’i‘? | What did you see? |
| Håfa un fa’tinas? | What did you make? |
1Common Alternative for Håfa un cho’gui?: In everyday speech, the phrase Håfa bidå-mu? is actually more commonly said.
Great job! In the next section, we’ll learn how to modify these questions slightly to ask about current actions.
Asking About Current Actions: “What are you buying?
What changes if we’re asking about something happening right now? To make “what” questions about current actions, we need to change our verb. Other than this one small change, everything else stays the same.
To change our verb, we simply reduplicate it. and use it in our “what” questions.
To get started, let’s first reduplicate our verbs in the table below:
| Root Word | Reduplicated |
|---|---|
| cho’gui | chócho’gui |
| sångan | såsångan |
| fåhan | fåfåhan |
| kånnu’ | kåkånnu’ |
| aligao | alíligao |
| li’i’ | líli’i’ |
| fa’tinas | fa’títinas |
Now we are ready to make “what” questions about current actions. We’ll use the same word order as the previous section, but instead of the root form of the verb we’ll use these new, reduplicated forms.
The word order we’ll practice with is shown below:
| Håfa + Hu Type Pronoun + Reduplicated Transitive Verb |
Our sentence drills are in the table below. We’ll continue using the phrase chunk Håfa un (“What did you…”) to keep things simple:
| Chamoru | English |
|---|---|
| Håfa un chócho’gui?2 | What are you doing? |
| Håfa un såsångan? | What are you saying? |
| Håfa un fåfåhan? | What are you buying? |
| Håfa un kåkånnu‘? | What are you eating? |
| Håfa un aliligao? | What are you looking for? |
| Håfa un lili’i’? | What are you seeing? |
| Håfa un fa’titinas? | What are you making? |
2Common Alternative for Håfa un chócho’gui?: In everyday speech, the phrase Håfa bidådå-mu? is actually more commonly said.
Great job! In the next and final section, we’ll learn how to ask about actions that will happen.
Asking About Future Actions: “What will you buy?”
Now let’s learn how to ask “What will you buy?” To make these questions about future actions, we need to use Chamorro future markers.
Just like how we learned phrase chunks for past tense questions, we can also learn phrase chunks for making “what” questions about the future. These phrase chunks are shown below:
| Chamoru | English |
|---|---|
| Håfa para un… | What will you… |
| Håfa para bai hu… | What will I… |
| Håfa para u… | What will she/he… |
| Håfa para u ma… | What will they… |
| Håfa para bai in… | What will we… (exclusive) |
| Håfa para en… | What will you… (plural) |
| Håfa para ta… | What will we… (inclusive) |
But how do we make complete sentences with these phrase chunks? We simply add a transitive verb after the phrase chunk. Here is the word order we’ll practice:
| Håfa + Future Marker + Hu Type Pronoun + Transitive Verb |
And our sentence drills are below. To continue keeping things simple, all questions being with the phrase chunk Håfa para un… (“What will you…”):
| Chamoru | English |
|---|---|
| Håfa para un cho’gui? | What will you do? |
| Håfa para un sångan? | What will you say? |
| Håfa para un fåhan? | What will you buy? |
| Håfa para un kånnu’? | What will you eat? |
| Håfa para un aligao? | What will you look for? |
| Håfa para un li’i’? | What will you see? |
| Håfa para un fa’tinas? | What will you make? |
And that wraps up the sentence drills for this lesson!
Lesson Summary
In this lesson, we focused on learning simple patterns for asking “what” questions using the word håfa (“what”). Our questions focused on asking another person what they did, such as What did you buy? What did you do? We built these questions on key phrase chunks and learned the small changes for the past, present and future tense.
Keep Learning! Continue to the Next Lesson (TBD)
Stay tuned for our next lesson in this series, where we’ll learn how to make “who” questions in Chamorro with the word håyi.
Documentation & Further Study
References
Topping, D. M., & Dungca, B. C. Chamorro Reference Grammar (PALI Language Texts―Micronesia). University of Hawaii Press, 1973.
Topping, Donald M. Spoken Chamorro: With Grammatical Notes and Glossary (Second Edition). University of Hawaii Press, 1980.
Further Reading
Topping, D. M., & Dungca, B. C. “Håfa.” In Chamorro Reference Grammar, 156-157. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1973.
Topping, D. M., & Dungca, B. C. “Possessive Pronouns as Subject.” In Chamorro Reference Grammar, 224-225. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1973.
Topping, D.M. “5.12 QUESTION-ANSWER DRILL. Hafa and hayi plus transitive clause.” In Spoken Chamorro: With Grammatical Notes and Glossary (Second Edition), 66. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1980.
Topping, D.M. “5.20 REPETITION DRILL. Questions using hafa with transitive pronouns.” In Spoken Chamorro: With Grammatical Notes and Glossary (Second Edition), 68-69. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1980.
Topping, D.M. “5.21 QUESTION-ANSWER DRILL. Hafa with transitive pronouns and nouns.” In Spoken Chamorro: With Grammatical Notes and Glossary (Second Edition), 69. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1980.
Topping, D.M. “5.23 QUESTION DRILL. Hafa and hayi.” In Spoken Chamorro: With Grammatical Notes and Glossary (Second Edition), 70. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1980.
Lengguahi-ta 
Pingback: How to Say “This” and “That” in Chamorro – Lengguahi-ta