Sentence 4.9 whose cigarettes

A tí te katatôkí tamú chí?

Whose cigarettes are these? The order reads Are these cigarettes whose? These cigarettes are the subject. Whose? is the object. Again the order of the sentence is different. I wonder if this will turn out to be the common practice.

I suspect that the age of the text is showing through. It was written in 1947. I suspect that anyone going to China in that period was assumed to be single, adult and an imperialist. And also a smoker. Ironically only a few years later the Chinese government would close its borders to foreigners from the colonial powers. That is another story.

The word for cigarette troubled me. The characters used are tobacco-roll-nominal. For a start I didn't have a word for tobacco. I went to an older form of this language where the word was tovako and applied some rules to shorten it toako > tôko. I found a verb kata, to roll. Did I want to add a nominal ending to it. That sounded like it would be too long. I decided that I would swap the order around and make it roll-tobacco. The word is cigarettes with a plural i-ending. What will the singular look like? If it is used in the singular. Thoughts for another day.

The word in front of katatôkí, te is an article. It is the plural form we have encountered as ta, male article, da female article and ten, neuter article. It can be a demonstrative, a definite article or a pronoun as needed.

The article is used again with the phrase for whose. Here it is direct object before the word for who. The form for 'whose' where it is based on 'the who' (not to be confused with the band). The language does not use the accusative case if the noun or pronoun is considered to be a person, instead the direct object is used, which is the dative case without a preposition before it.