A grammar of Pite Saami, 2014

8 Verbs
8.5.6 Other possible verb classes
The data in the corpus are unfortunately not sufficient to be entirely confident
concerning the five inflectional classes for verbs proposed here. With this in
mind, the data concerning several verbs seem unusual, but also contradictory
and inconsistent. Specifically, limited data on the verbs årret ‘sleep’, årrat ‘fall
asleep’ and ádnot ‘request’ exist in the corpus indicating that these may belong
to Class IV or some subset of Class IV verbs. Furthermore, a number of verbs
with bisyllabic infinitive forms marked by -i- as a post-stem class-marking suffix
exist in the data in the wordlist compiled by the Wordlist Project (cf. §1.2.3.4);
however, in many cases, it seems that these verbs in fact belong to Class III, and
the -i- class marker is simply an inconsistent spelling of e, as the realizations of /i/
and /e/ in unstressed syllables are more centralized, and thus easily confusable,
particularly when applying what are otherwise Swedish graphemes representing
more distinctly front Swedish vowels. For instance, the verb virrtit ‘must’
should perhaps be spelled virrtet and likely belongs to Class III. More data on
this and other bisyllabic verbs with the -i- spelling need to be gathered to determine
whether another inflectional class exists, or if these are only subclasses for
Class IV and perhaps Class I, II or III.
8.5.7 The verb årrot ‘be’
The verb årrot ‘be’ can be used both as a copula (cf. §13.1.4) and as an auxiliary
(cf. §13.1.5.2); its paradigm is presented in Table 8.25. It is an unusual verb in a
number of ways; these are listed on the following page.
Table 8.25: The inflectional paradigm for the verb årrot ‘be’
sg du pl
prs 1 st lev lin lep
2 nd lä/’l lähpen lehpet
3 rd lä/’l lähpa lea/’l
pst 1 st lidjiv lijmen lijme
2 nd lidje lijden lijde
3 rd lij lijga lidjen
imp 2 nd n/a n/a n/a
inf årrot conneg lä
prf urrum/lam
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