The cell ‘Root’ can be used as an indicator which verbs belong to the same word family. Crucially, we do not claim that the annotated form is the exact phonological form of the root of the verb. Rather, this should be taken as a cell that can help the users group together verbs that are related by some common core (the chosen form could in principle be replaced by a random number/index).

Still, we tried to capture what we believe is the common core of all the related verbs. The material in the cell ‘Root’ therefore refers to the verb without prefixes, thematic vowels or verbal affixes.

As evident from the table above, the meaning of verbs was taken as a motivating factor to determine that verbs with homophonous material belong in the same word family. In addition, another motivation for the choice of the root were alternation patterns. If multiple verbs have the same alternation pattern in their paradigm and in the aspectual pair, we treated them as having the same root.

If the verb displays root allomorphy, we choose one of the forms of the root. While we gravitated towards what plausibly is the underlying form, this is not necessarily always so. Crucially, the same form of the root is then used with all the verbs within the same word family.

If there are two potential homophonous roots and only one of them displays an alternation, we use this to separate it from the other root. We return to the hyphen.