[danabramov]

Thank you! Appreciate the kindhearted comment.

Frankly, this thread was kind of wild, and it really got to me. It's not my first rodeo on HN, but the amount of wilful misunderstanding, weaponized debate devices, and manipulative grandstanding was off the charts compared to anything I've ever received in response to articles about programming. I'm still not sure what to attribute this to, and it will likely torture me for some more time.

I mention this at the end of the article, but the paper that inspired me is "No consonant-final stems in Japanese verb morphology" (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2010.03.026). It uses a different notation but it also considers the suffixes to be -(i)masu, -(a)nai, and so on, and specifies rules for how empty-ish slots concatenate. Maybe you'll be able to understand it better than I did! I found it very interesting but dense.