A grammar of Pite Saami, 2014

5 Nominals I: Nouns
noun paradigm: the value ‘str-wk’ indicates that nom.sg is marked by the strong
grade and nom.pl by the weak grade, while ‘wk-str’ is the opposite pattern.
Class I is a sort of default class and is therefore dealt with first in §5.4.1, while
classes II and III are described in §5.4.2 and §5.4.3. The final section (§5.4.4) provides
a brief summary of the noun classes, including a table listing examples from
each class.
5.4.1 Class I
Nouns in Class I are characterized by:
• str-wk grade alignment (when relevant)
Class I nouns can be divided into five subclasses, depending on the class-marking
vowel they have, as illustrated in Table 5.11.
Table 5.11: Subclasses of Class I nouns and their class marking suffixes
subclass noun class suffix
Ia -a
Ib -á
Ic -o
Id -å
Ie -e,i,á
The first four subclasses behave very similarly, while subclass Ie is unique due
to the presence of j-suffix vowel harmony, as discussed in detail in §5.4.1.1. For
subclasses Ia, Ib, Ic and Id, the class marking suffix is invariable throughout the
paradigm, while the class marking suffix for subclass Ie varies due to j-suffix
vowel harmony.
For nouns with consonant gradation and/or umlaut in Class I, nom.sg, ill.sg
and ess are in the strong grade and have ä or ua/uä in V1 position, while other
case/number slots in a paradigm have the weak grade and ie or uo in V1 position.
The gradation pattern and class marking suffixes for Class I are summarized in
Table 5.12 on the facing page. Here, V stands for the vowel which comprises the
suffix for each class (i.e., a for Class Ia, á for Class Ib, o for Class Ic, å for Class Id
and e/i/á for Class Ie).
Inflectional paradigms can be found on pages 101 and 102 to illustrate subclasses
Ia, Ib, Ic and Id. The paradigms for the words luakkta ‘bay’ and mánná
100