Cherokee grammar-The Daily Ledger

Cherokee or Tsalagi (ᏣᎳᎩ ᎦᏬᏂᎯᏍᏗ, Tsalagi Gawonihisdi [dʒalaˈɡî ɡawónihisˈdî]) is an endangered-to-moribund Iroquoian language and the native language of the Cherokee people.

All presented prefixes and suffixes will be in the Latin script.

Cherokee grammar

General

Cherokee is a polysynthetic verb-heavy nominative–accusative language ??Accusative??Proof?Example? with a non-productive incorporation system. Verbs may be inflected with a large number of suffixes and prefixes that express a range of properties, including subject and/or object agreement, tense and aspect, and evidentiality.

Cherokee grammar

Verbs

Verbs are the central, obligatory part of Cherokee sentences (with the exception of affirmative copular sentences in the present tense). Verbs in Cherokee fall into two conjugation classes, which determine the forms of pronominal prefixes in most tenses.

Cherokee grammar

Structure

The morphological structure of verbs can be analyzed in terms of a slot system, in which every verb possesses the following basic slots. Obligatory items are marked in bold.

Please note that for every following table only the basic form, sometimes/mostly even without a translation, will be listed to not overload the visual input. Phonemical changes and the meaning depend heavily on context and are better described individually in the following sections. The basic morpheme will be displayed in bold for disambiguation. Here is an overview for the depiction of the context and the following changes:

Initial prefixes (-3) The initial prefixes are optional. They may not co-occur if they inhabit the same slot or convey contradictory ideas.

Pronoun prefixes (-2) All Cherokee verbs occur with a pronoun prefix that expresses person properties of a subject argument, object argument, or some combinations of subject and object properties. There are two sets of pronoun prefixes, set A and set B (also known as set I and set II). Only set B prefixes are used with completive and infinitive stems. In other tenses, the choice of prefix is determined by the identity of the verb. These are only present if the verb is intransitive, for transitive verbs one joined set is used. Mark that the exclusive forms are generated by taking the corresponding 2nd person form and adding an "O".

Set I (A) (The structure is _C | _V)

Set II (B)

Compound pronouns

Compound pronoun prefixes express a combination of subject and object properties. Some unique forms are used when both the subject and object of the verb are participants in the conversation (first and second person). Other compound pronouns are used with combinations of a first or second person subject and a third person object. These forms depend on the animacy of the third person object. A prominent feature of transitive pronouns is the -y- insertion. Often the pronoun relationship is both ways and can be used for either action, ambiguity is ensured by patterns of changes within the verb stem.

1st person singular object - 'me'

2nd person singular object 'thee'

Easily recognizable are the forms of the first-to-second person plural and dual. They are produced via a vowel alternation from the second person forms in which former -i- now wields -v-.

3rd person singular animate object 'the other'

These are basically the set A pronouns, but with a -y- insertion in the singular and an -e- prefix in all forms where the second person is active and non-singular.