A grammar of Pite Saami, 2014

5 Nominals I: Nouns
Table 5.22: The Class III consonant gradation pattern and inflectional noun class
suffixes
singular plural
nom wk - str -a
gen str -a str -iacc
str -a- str -iill
str -i- str -iiness
str -i- str -ielat
str -i- str -icom
str -i- str -iabess
str n/a str n/a
ess n/a n/a
paradigm for each word is not listed due to a lack of space, the forms for nom.sg,
nom.pl, acc.sg, gen.pl, ill.sg and elat.sg are more than sufficient to convey the
relevant morphological differences between the classes.
5.5 Possessive suffixes
A special set of possessive suffixes exists in Pite Saami which indicate, in addition
to case and number for the host noun, the person and number of the possessor
of the referent of the host noun. While the possessive suffixes go back to Proto-
Saami (Sammallahti 1998: 73), they seem to have nearly fallen out of use in contemporary
Pite Saami, and are only attested in three recordings from the corpus.
These examples from the corpus are presented first, and a discussion follows.
While there are technically nine tokens of possessive pronouns in the corpus,
these nine tokens can be grouped into two identical sets, so that effectively only
two examples are available. Specifically, there are three tokens of áhttjes ‘my
father’ in nominative case by one speaker in two different recordings, and three
tokens of the parallel construction mammaset ja pahpaset ‘your mother and your
father’ by another speaker in one recording. An example from the first speaker
is provided in (39), and an example 14 from the second speaker in (40).
14 The example in (40) is essentially identical to the other utterance with four tokens of these
same noun stems with possessive suffixes (pit100703a.034).
108