User:Mellohi!/Okinawan verbs

Okinawan verbs are formed with complex stem allomorphy and agglutinated endings. Okinawan verbs inflect for various dimensions such as mood, tense, formality, negation, and relativity. On the other hand, they do not inflect for person or number. In this article, all Okinawan terms will be written romanized, due to a lack of a consistent way of adapting the Japanese writing system to Okinawan, and numerous stems terminating in various consonants incompatible with the moraic nature of kana.

Primary stems
Okinawan verbal stems come in three primary varieties: an irrealis stem, a basic stem, and a conjunctive stem.
 * The irrealis stem, its Japanese counterpart the, is used to form negative, conditional, and imperative forms.
 * The basic stem, its Japanese counterpart the, is used to form basic, imperfective predicative constructions. It is also used as a base to attach politeness suffixes like -a(i)bīn, in addition to other miscellaneous suffixes.
 * The conjunctive stem, its Japanese counterpart the te-form stem, is used to form perfective, progressive, resultative, and conjunctive forms.

The Shuri-Naha Dialect Dictionary (now shutdown) indicated the three stems with the headword itself (delete the final moraic nasal and then a /u/, then you now have the basic stem), and two other suffixed forms in the line below the headword. For the first one, with an /a/ followed by moraic nasal, those can be deleted to get the irrealis stem ending. The next suffix provided by the dictionary is the conjunctive form suffix. Delete the /i/ at the end to get the conjunctive stem ending.

The morphophonological alternations between the three primary stems in various stem classes is summarized in the table below.

Putting the allomorphy into practice, with various example verbs:

Secondary stems
From these primary stems can be derived a set of secondary stems, onto which several mood endings can be attached.
 * The negative stem is formed by attaching -an- to the primary irrealis stem. It is used to form negative statements.
 * The imperfective stem is formed by taking the basic stem and attaching -u- afterwards.
 * The formal stem can be made by attaching either -aibī- (adjectives and existentials) or -abī- (all other verbs) onto the basic stem.
 * The perfective stem can be created by attaching -a- to the conjunctive stem.
 * The progressive stem can be created by attaching -ō- to the conjunctive stem.
 * The resultative stem can be created by attaching -ē- to the conjunctive stem.

All secondary stems can be further suffixed with -ta- to create a past-tense version of the stem.

Imperative endings
Imperative endings are directly attached onto the primary irrealis stem.
 * -i, the positive imperative ending.
 * -ē, a blunter counterpart to -i.
 * -una, a negative imperative (or prohibitive) ending. This becomes -nna on r-stem verbs.

Basic endings
The following endings are suffixed to the secondary stems.
 * -n, a general predicative ending used to form basic predicates. It is suffixed onto any secondary stem, only vanishing when that stem already ends in -n-.
 * -ru, commonly called an attributive ending, used to create relative clauses. It cannot be attached to the negative non-past stem.
 * -mi, attachable to all non-past secondary stems except the perfective, creates a yes-no question. When attached to the negative stem, it becomes just -i.
 * -ī is the yes/no question ending attached to perfective and past stems. It suppresses the -a- inherent to both stems.
 * -ga, attachable to all secondary stems, creates a wh-question.
 * -ra is a dubitative suffix attachable to all secondary stems except the negative non-past.