Cherokee grammar

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.

General
Cherokee is a polysynthetic verb-heavy nominative–accusative language 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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

1st person dual inclusive object "us both"
These basically stem from the active forms of the corresponding set B pronouns, but now they represent the direct object instead.

Final and non-final suffixes (1)
The slots of both final and non-final suffixes cannot be properly dissected and thus the attribute final only means that one of these is obligated at all times. For some suffixes even the exact position is disputed amongst native speakers. In the following table final suffixes are marked bold. Because of the sheer amount of suffixes and the number of exceptions it is more efficient for students to learn the most common fused forms first (mostly those with -'i). Markers of aspect and tense are found in this category.

Nouns
Nouns often occur as arguments of verbs. They can also be used predicatively, without a copular verb. Nouns are generally much less inflected than verbs. However, some nouns can occur with inflectional affixes similar to those found on verbs, mainly pronominal prefixes and the distributive prefix.

Prefixes
The number of prefixes nouns can take is comparably smaller than that of verbs, but since nouns can be treated as verbs with the translation of "to be", the same prefixes as with verbs may be used, if not exchanged with one of the three below. Thus plural words for humans take an(i)- as marker (even if the a was optional).

Conjugation - to be someone
For persons and their belongings normally set A prefixes are used. The second person forms also serve as vocative.

Possession - to belong to someone
Every bodypart has to be possessed, unless it is understood as detached or as a general image for example. The bodyparts take both set A and set B prefixes.

Kinship - to be someone in relation to someone
To explain kinship (or other relationships) the transitive compound pronouns are used. In this case the agent part expresses who it is (ex. I am a father) whilst the formerly patient part indicates to whom the relationship takes place (I-him-father = I, his father).

Suffixes
The same with the prefixes; the presented suffixes are exclusive for nouns, whilst these can also take numerous verb suffixes. The coverbal suffixes are applied after the pure noun suffixes.

Adjectives
Adjectives can also be treated as verbs of certain qualities, they precede the noun they qualify.

Adverbs
Adverbs are essentially adjectives preceding the qualified verb.