Only nine verbs and no conjugations?
Britton WatkinsXenolinguist, language consultant
Yes. I mean, there are nine core verbs. There are a couple of things like the verb "ee" becomes "ee ee", which means resemble. So I guess technically you could argue that that might be a separate verb. But yeah, in terms of the formalized language, the way we imagine Xi'an children learning it in school, they're taught that there are nine verbs, and they come in six different flavors depending on how polite or impolite you are trying to be at the time. So it's not just nine words. It turns into a kind of matrix if you're being culturally correct. But it's still a very limited number of verbs, what we would actually call a verb, a thing that behaves like a verb in the language, yes.
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