Chapter 115Invitations, Deliberation, and Wishes
Inclusive and other-person ro constructions, regional endings, Shizunai na, self-directed so, and wishes with ta and oka.
115.1 Inviting agreement
The final particle ro commonly accompanies an invitation to act together. The predicate then uses the inclusive fourth-person series: =an on an intransitive verb, or a= on a transitive verb. These are uses of the ordinary person forms described in Chapter 62 (Person Marking and Argument Roles) Nakagawa (2024: 333–334).
‘Let's try travelling all around the country by car sometime.’
Nakagawa 2024: 333; Saru, Example 575, citing Honda 2001:19
The fourth-person forms include speaker and addressee. Wa inkar contributes the meaning ‘try’; KURUMA is the Japanese loan retained in the source.
Nakagawa describes ro more broadly as seeking the interlocutor's agreement. It can accompany a proposed action by the speaker alone. His Saru exchange has k=arpa ro ‘shall I go?’ followed by permission to go Nakagawa (2024: 334, example 578, citing Tamura 1988a:55).
115.2 Regional forms
Nakagawa lists ro for Horobetsu, Saru, Chitose, and Shizunai; rok for Tokachi and Shiranuka; and no for Urakawa and Samani. Both ro and rok are reported for Ishikari Nakagawa (2024: 333–334).
Refsing's Shizunai description gives na in this function: uerpak ipe=an na, ‘let us eat together’. She interprets it as an invitation that includes the speaker, sometimes with an admonitory implication Refsing (1986: 204, §14.9.4.3, example 309). The reports describe overlapping resources rather than a single exclusive map of regional endings.
115.3 Deliberation and wishes
Chitose so occurs in self-directed deliberation. Nakagawa's ku=ye so follows mention of telling a story: the speaker considers doing so Nakagawa (2024: 334, example 580). The interlocutor's agreement need not be the point of such an utterance.
For a wish about a hypothetical situation, Nakagawa describes an expression with emphatic ta and final oka. The following example concerns taking a particular woman as a wife if she were a goddess Nakagawa (2024: 336).
Desire expressed with rusuy has its own person and word-structure questions; see Chapter 116 (Desire, Rusuy, and Compound Predicates). Direct commands and prohibitions are covered in Chapter 114 (Commands, Requests, and Prohibitions).