A grammar of Pite Saami, 2014

8 Verbs
8.5.1 Class I
Verbs in Class I are relatively simple, and characterized as follows:
• a bisyllabic infinitive form
• the class marking suffix is consistently -o
• potentially subject to consonant gradation and umlaut, but not vowel harmony
The verb viessot ‘live, feel’ is provided in Table 8.13 as an example. Other examples
of Class I verbs include: årrot ‘reside’, gårrot ‘sew’, gähttjot ‘tell’, lávvlot
‘sing’ and såggot ‘drown’.
Table 8.13: The inflectional paradigm for the Class I verb viessot ‘live, feel’
sg du pl
prs 1 st vies-o-v viess-o-n viess-o-p
2 nd vies-o viess-o-bähten viess-o-bähtet
3 rd viess-o viess-o-ba viess-o
pst 1 st viess-o-v vies-o-jmen vies-o-jme
2 nd viess-o vies-o-jden vies-o-jde
3 rd vies-o-j vies-o-jga viess-o-n
imp 2 nd vies-o viess-o-n viess-o-t
inf viess-o-t conneg vies-o
prf viess-o-m
Table 8.14 on the facing page summarizes the gradation pattern and class suffixes
for Class I verbs. Note that umlaut alternations align with consonant gradation
alternations.
There are a number of verbs which seem to be marked by -u as a class marker in
infinitive, such as gävdnut ‘exist’ and pruvkut ‘use; usually do’. While the data in
the corpus are incomplete, such verbs likely pattern in essentially the same way
as the verbs mentioned above marked by -o, only they are consistently marked
with -u as the class marking suffix.
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