South Saami

The aim of this section is to provide some information on a few aspects of South Saami which will be important to understand for this grammar. First is an overview of the case system. This is followed by a discussion of how words may be decomposed into stems, feet and syllables. This is important as it supports the description of inflectional paradigms, something with which this grammar is largely concerned. Finally, there is a brief discussion of metaphony in South Saami—a complex system of grammatical vowel changes which is unique among the Saami languages.

Cases

Grammatical case is a system in which the grammatical function of nominals (nouns, pronouns, sometimes adjectives) is shown by changing their form. That is, the role of a noun in a sentence and its relationship to other nouns is indicated through regular changes to the word itself. To illustrate, in English, remnants of a case system are retained in the different subjective, objective and possessive forms of pronouns. For example, the pronoun she (subjective) has the objective form her and possessive form hers. Those familiar with German will be aware that it maintains four cases from Proto-Germanic: nominative, accusative, genitive and dative.

Saami languages, and Uralic languages more generally, have large numbers of cases compared to most European languages. South Saami has eight cases—nominative, accusative, genitive, illative, inessive, elative, comitative and essive. The general usage of these cases is outlined below, using comparable English constructions and South Saami examples. Further detail and examples can be found in later sections.

The Nominative

Gajpe lea aelhkie. - The hat is simple.

This case marks the subject of a sentence (e.g. "John" in "John likes the dog"). It can be thought of as the base form of a noun and is the form you would find in a dictionary. In addition, the nominative is also used for the subject complement of a sentence (e.g. "a man" in "he is a man").

The Accusative

Manne gajpem åastam. - I buy the hat.

This case marks the object of a sentence (e.g. "the dog" in "John likes the dog").

The Genitive

gajpen gïerhgietje - the top of the hat

This case deals with relationships of belonging, marking the possessor (e.g. "his" in "his book"). In South Saami, the genitive is also used with postpositions.

The Illative

Manne gajpese vaadtsam. - I walk to the hat.

This case applies for movement towards or into something (e.g. "to the park" in "I go to the park").

The Inessive

Njåemele gajpesne. - The rabbit is in the hat.

This case deals with the state of being in, at or on something (e.g. "at school" in "the children are at school").

The Elative

Dïhte gajpeste bööti. - It came from the hat.

This case applies for movement away from something (e.g. "from the town" in "they came from the town").

The Comitative

Dïhte dam gajpine tjeaka. - He hides it with the hat.

This case is used to indicate instrument or accompaniment and is broadly encompassed by the English "with" (e.g. "with a knife" in "I cut the bread with a knife" or "with grandma" in "I spoke with grandma").

The Essive

Dellie goh gajpine lij. - It was once a hat.

This case deals with state, and often applies to the notion of "like", "as" or "for". Essive can inform what something is, was, or will become.

Stems

A stem is the part of a word off which all inflection is based. Stems contain the lexical information of a word, to which information about grammatical category (e.g. tense, number, person, case) is added through inflection. Inflection of stems in South Saami involves the addition of an ending, or suffix. It is rarely apparent where the boundaries between stems and suffixes lie—inflection can result in a change in the final vowel in what may be considered the stem, which itself may influence the prior vowel (a process called metaphony, discussed below)—so the general notion that stems are invariant with inflection is largely untrue for South Saami.

A word or stem can be broken down into one or more feet, which can be decomposed further into syllables. Syllables should be a familiar concept from English—in South Saami they contain a single vowel sound and may have one or more consonants at the start and one consonant at the end. A single long vowel is a valid syllable, but a syllable cannot contain only consonants.

A foot consists of one, two or three syllables, where the first syllable has the primary stress, a second syllable is unstressed, and a third syllable has a weaker, secondary stress. Consequently, we can break down a word of known stress into feet. This is important because the inflection of a stem depends on the number of syllables in its final foot. Feet, and words with even numbers of syllables, are referred to as even, while those with odd numbers of syllables are referred to as odd. When even and odd are used with regard to nouns, verbs, etc., it is the number of syllables in their stems which is even or odd.

Metaphony

Unlike the other Saami languages, South Saami does not exhibit consonant gradation. In contrast, a characteristic feature of the language is a system of metaphony, where vowels in proximity become more similar. The specific metaphony present in South Saami is sometimes referred to as umlaut by analogy with the similar effect in the Germanic languages, but is much more complex.

As an example of the process, the following is part of the conjugation of the verb bïssedh. The top line is a gloss; the notation follows the Leipzig Glossing rules.

To illustrate the complexity of metaphony in South Saami, consider the following example (Ylikoski, 2022).

In the illative, the three nouns gain the ending -(a)sse. Metaphony does not occur for skovtere, but for daktere and tjengkere the penultimate vowel is changed. However, for daktere it becomes a, while for tjengkere it is changed to ie. So, it can be seen that even metaphony on similar stems (in this case odd stems ending -ere) may have markedly different results. There are historical reasons for these differences and a dedicated page discussing metaphony may be added in time, but for the purposes of this grammar it should suffice simply to be aware of these sound changes.

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