A grammar of Pite Saami, 2014

5 Nominals I: Nouns
there are not enough data to come to any definitive conclusions concerning the
status of essive in current Pite Saami usage.
5.3 Number and case marking on nouns
As indicated in the previous sections, Pite Saami nouns inflect for nine cases and
two number categories (only the essive and possibly the abessive cases do not
inflect for number). While case and number are generally marked by nominal suffixes,
they are often supplemented by other morphophonological marking strategies,
or even expressed solely by non-linear morphology. These other strategies
are:
• consonant alternations in the stem (also known as consonant gradation)
• stem-vowel alternations (umlaut)
• vowel harmony
Concerning nouns, the segmental alternations are discussed in detail in §5.3.2,
while vowel harmony is presented in §5.4.1.1. First, a short discussion of the
nominal suffixes follows here.
5.3.1 Nominal suffixes
Pite Saami has a number of portmanteau suffixes expressing case and number.
Only nom.sg, nom.pl and gen.sg are generally not marked by any linear morphology.
The nominal suffixes marking case and number are listed in Table 5.1
on the facing page. Note that the status of the abessive suffixes is unclear, including
whether they inflect for number, as discussed in §5.3.3. Nouns in essive case
do not inflect for number.
In nom.pl and gen.sg, the -h suffix is optional in Pite Saami (and therefore
appears in parentheses in Table 5.1). 5 The com.sg suffix has two allomorphs: -jn
and -jna, which seem to be in free variation in the corpus, and not determined
phonologically.
5.3.1.1 Nominal suffixes and syncretism
Several of the nominal inflectional suffixes, considered by themselves, are homophonous:
5 The paradigms in Lehtiranta (1992: 156–157) also indicate an optional -h, while Lagercrantz
(1926: 104–105) does not indicate any -h at all.
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