A grammar of Pite Saami, 2014

5 Nominals I: Nouns
Table 5.9: Umlaut alternation patterns for nouns, with nom.sg and nom.pl example
pairs
x ‐ y nom.sg nom.pl
ɛ ‐ e /pɛkːa/ ‐ /pekːa/ ‘wind’
bägga biegga
u͡a ‐ o /lu͡akːta/ ‐ /lokta/ ‘bay’
luakkta luokta
tionship between abessive as a case per se and the morphophonological marking
of nouns in the abessive case. It seems to be rarely used in natural speech, and
is only attested in the corpus in elicitation sessions. Even in elicitation sessions,
language consultants were often hesitant or uncertain of the word forms they
produced, and often produced conflicting forms for a single item. Indeed, the
slipperiness of the abessive case is nothing new, as both Lagercrantz (1926) and
Lehtiranta (1992) only provide incomplete treatments of abessive.
One potential source of the confusion (even for speakers) is the fact that abessive
suffixes are unique in two ways. First, there is significant allomorphy, and,
secondly, some of the allomorphs are the only bisyllabic nominal inflection suffixes
in Pite Saami. The attested forms are -dak, -daga, -gat, -gahta and -ahta
(cf. examples (32) and (33) on page 90). Furthermore, the weak grade usually
accompanies abessive, but sometimes the strong grade does. In some cases of
Class Ie nouns, j-suffix vowel harmony is triggered, in others it is not. In some
cases, number is clearly marked, in other cases, there is no distinction between
singular and plural.
As a result, the following sections on inflectional noun classes are only able to
provide a limited and preliminary description concerning abessive.
5.4 Inflectional classes for nouns
Nouns in Pite Saami can be grouped into three main inflectional classes, with
several subclasses, based on recurring patterns across case/number inflectional
paradigms. Each noun is marked by a class suffix 11 which is attached directly
after the noun stem and precedes case/number suffixes (cf. Figure 1 on page 83).
11 I am indebted to phonologist and Lule Saami scholar Bruce Morén-Duolljá for inspiring me to
consider an approach to the data involving post-stem class marking morphology.
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