One immutable record. No silent merging.

Academic teaching rationale

### óunabalamuga *“hopefully (one) will answer / (one) should answer.”* The form **óunabalamuga** is built upon the root *óunaba*, “to answer” (The People's Garifuna Dictionary (Cayetano)). To it is joined the hopeful optative *-lamuga*, which voices the action as something hoped for. Taken whole, the word means precisely “hopefully (one) will answer / (one) should answer” — its gloss states the fully-inflected sense, never the bare meaning of the root. Set against its kin, **nóunaba** (“I answer”); **bóunaba** (“you answer”): each shares the same stem yet bends it to a different shade of meaning, which is exactly how Garífuna wins great precision from a single root. While a citation of this exact form still awaits collection, its root is heard in living speech, as in *“Hugiela me ounaba niduheyun ahen nadaruyoun lubei nugudi”* — ‘My people please answer if I ambeing untruthful’. [elar_sg0340_eaf_gold_annotations_43] *The construction rests on MARAGAÑ (Shaka) MAGARADA 2026-06-24 (modal/optative paradigm, root ex. aguyaguda). This is a principled composition — a cited root joined to a cited paradigm — and so it is offered for fluent-elder validation rather than asserted as attested.*