Verb roots in Inuktut describe actions or states of being. The verb ending tells us who is performing the action.
In the above word, taku- describes the action of seeing and the verb ending –junga describes who is seeing.
By using different verb endings we can talk about different people doing the same action:
|nirijuq||he / she eats|
|nirijuguk||the two of us eat|
|nirijugut||we (3+) eat|
|nirijusik||you two eat|
|nirijusi||you (3+) eat|
|nirijuuk||the two of them eat|
|nirijut||they (3+) eat|
The verb endings highlighted above in blue can be added to any root that ends in a vowel. Remember Inuktut has three vowels i, u and a.
If the root ends in any other letter, we change the j that begins each of these verb endings to t:
|sinittuq||he / she sleeps|