Ne' ne haya'tí haksa'aa hanôkek ne kanöhsa'ôwe kahatakô.
There was a little boy who lived all alone in a house in the forest.

hanôkek  ::  he lived (in a place)

Today's word is a Stative Past verb form; it is used here at the beginning of the story to situate it in the past.  In English, if we are telling a story that happened in the past, we have to use the past tense in every sentence; but not in Mingo.  We will see a couple more Stative Past forms here at the start of the story, but after that they don't show up anymore. In Mingo, once the listeners know that this story is happening in the past, there is no need to constantly repeat that information.

[In later lessons we'll see why we're calling this the "Stative Past" form of the verb, and not just the "Past Tense".  For now, don't worry too much about that.]

This verb refers to living in a particular place, in the sense of "reside", "inhabit", or "dwell", but not in the sense of being alive (there's a different verb for that in Mingo).  We can change the prefixes on this verb
to change who it is we're talking about.

knôkek  --  I lived (in a place)
snôkek  --  you lived (in a place)
hanôkek  --  he lived (in a place)
yenôkek  --  she lived (in a place)
kanôkek  --  it lived (in a place)

If we look at the prefixes on these verbs, we can recognize the Agent-C prefix pattern (k-/s-/ha-/ye-/ka-).  This makes sense, since the stem here is -nôkek, which starts with just a single consonant -n-.

Although these 5 forms are useful, you may find yourself more often wanting to use the basic (non-past) Stative form of this verb.  This form does not refer specifically to the past like the Stative Past form does; rather, it can refer equally well to the present or the past, depending on the context of the situation.  Out of context, though, we will usually translate these forms into English with the present tense.

Once we know the Stative Past forms of this verb, it is easy to learn the basic Stative forms; all we need to do is to exchange the final -k for a -'.  Everything else stays exactly the same.

knôke'  --  I live (in a place)
snôke'  --  you live (in a place)
hanôke'  --  he lives (in a place)
yenôke'  --  she lives (in a place)
kanôke'  --  it lives (in a place)

In fact, this is a regular pattern for verbs in Mingo.  Verbs that end in -e' in their basic Stative form, will end in -ek in their Stative Past form.  We'll see this pattern again later on as we learn more verbs.

Note that even though we have changed the stem from the Stative Past form -nôkek to the basic Stative form -nôke', the same pattern of prefixes occurs with both.

A useful word to learn along with the verb "to live (in a place)" is the question word káwé, meaning "where?".  You can put this question word at the beginning of the sentence -- just like in English -- to ask questions like these:

Káwé snôke'?  --  Where do you live?
Káwé hanôke' ne haksa'aa?  --  Where does the boy live?
Káwé yenôkek ne yeksa'aa?  --  Where did the girl live?

To answer those questions, you simply put the location first, followed by the appropriate form of the verb.  Later on we'll learn names for particular cities and towns, but for now we can just borrow the English
names, and say, for example:

Pittsburgh knôke'.  --  I live in Pittsburgh.
Charleston hanôke' ne haksa'aa.  --  The boy lives in Charleston.
Virginia yenôkek ne yeksa'aa.  --  The girl lived in Virginia.

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