Verbs: Verbs appear in their basic form, that is mostly without the set
of meaningful suffix-like elements which in conversation, most often
occur on them. This basic form can be regarded as broadly equivalent to
the infinitive form in English, though Apatani does not have infinitive
in the strict sense. In their simplest form, those are monosyllabic
"verbal
roots" (v-r.). The various suffixed elements inflect the meaning of
the verb, modifying its aspect, mood or tense, and their number can be
as high as six or seven. It is of course not possible to list all those
suffixed forms. At the same time, providing only monosyllabic verbs is clearly not enough, so we had to compromise. For
the sake of convenience, both verbal roots (such as dii 'to eat'), together with a dependent set of disyllabic common derivatives (such as diibo
'to eat along with others') are listed in the dictionary. Besides,
most commonly found suffix combinations are provided as separate
entries, preceded by a hyphen, under the label vsuff.
(verbal suffix). The hyphen indicates that these are not grammatical
words, but dependent units attached to verbs or adjectives, for eg. prospective suffix -nedo ('may').
Searching
a verb encountered in a text as a suffixed form requires its verbal
root or disyllabic first derivate to be identified first. We recommend
to start searching for the two initial syllables, then, if not found,
the monosyllabic root. Once the meaning of this form is identified
(having either one or two syllables), the reader can turn on the suffixed
part. The suffixed part is to be searched as a separate
entry, it appears prefixed by a hyphen. From there the global
meaning can been easily reconstructed. For example, if the suffixed
form is diibalado, a first
search for 'diiba' will give the basic meaning of the verb ('to eat together') and a second search for -lado will inform that this suffix is a marker of the present continuous form ('am/are/is [do]ing'). Therefore Molu diibalado will be translated by the reader as 'they are eating together'.
Note: for dictionary searching ii, ch, kh and ng are treated as if they were four separate letters, therefore words (and letters within words) are sorted according to the following order:
a, b, ch, d, e, g, h, i, ii, j, k, kh, l, m, n, ng, o, p, r, s, t, u, w, y, z
According to this order, *ngiiyi occurs after *nyibu, *aku precedes *akha, and so on.
