johnbent
commented
1 year ago johnbent@gmail.com replied,
In another thread we discussed how we include the word okedii but not the
word okedau. Here's a bit of discussion about why this is true. Please
chime in with suggestions and comments about this if you have any.
In terms of which verb forms are added, here's an email I sent recently to Jim about how difficult this would be in addition to how it might make the website harder to use. The problem is that there are way too many forms of each Palauan verb!
We have thought about adding all forms beyond just the 3rd person forms. Currently we only add when they're irregular. I wanted originally to add all of them but Lewis Josephs talked me out of it. Correctly I think. Each verb has the base verb and then 5 hypothetical prefix forms (k-, l-, m-, d-, ki-) and 10 suffix (none for imperfect, then nine perfective: -k -au -ii -d -mam -miu -ir and one for plural inanimate objects that sort of doesn't have a suffix) so that's a total of 60 forms for each verb. Then double that to 120 forms for each verb if you want to add plural forms. Adding them to the displayed list would hurt the usability of the site and how do we find them all anyway? Because there are also variant forms of each of the above; for example, sometimes it's -mam and sometimes it's -emam.
If we could somehow gather them, it would be useful to add them to the database as hidden words that aren't displayed but can be searched to find the root word. Although, if they're regular, it'd be better maybe to teach the rules to the website and have it say, 'that looks like the hypo 3rd person singular of mengang' or something.
Listing all verb forms created by johnbent@gmail.com on 2017-01-04 10:20:29