A grammar of Pite Saami, 2014

10.1 Nominal derivation
(4) båtsoj → buhtsu-tj ‘little reindeer’
reindeer\nom.sg reindeer-dim\nom.sg [pit110413b]e
(5) sabek → sabega-tj ‘little ski’
ski\nom.sg ski-dim\nom.sg [pit090525b]e
(6) bena → bednaga-tj ‘little dog’
dog\nom.sg dog-dim\nom.sg [pit080819a]e
The diminutive form features the same stem found in the nom.pl form of a
noun paradigm (differences in the segments occurring between the consonant
center and the right edge of the nominal base in these examples are due to regular
alternations in inflectional noun class suffixes on the base). The resulting
diminutive nouns are class IIIa nouns; a nearly complete paradigm for the derived
noun guolátj ‘little fish’ is provided in Table 5.20 in §5.4.3. Note also that
there is a diminutive verbalizer suffix -tj; cf. §10.2.1.
10.1.2 The general nominalizer suffix -k
The nominalizer suffix -k (spelled -g- intervocalically; glossed as nmlz 2 ) can be
affixed to a noun, a verb or an adjective. The resulting derived nouns have a
wide variety of meanings, but generally have a referent which is someone or
something with a property referred to by the base. A number of examples are
provided in (7) through (17) below, but this is hardly an exhaustive sample.
In (7) the derived noun guhkajuolgagijd ‘long-legger-acc.pl’ is based on a compound
noun guhka-juällge ‘long-leg’, and is used several times in the corpus to
refer to moose.
(7) vuojdne
vuojdne
edna
edna
see\2sg.pst some
‘Did you see some moose?’
guhkajuolgagijd?
guhka-juolga-g-ijd
long-leg-nmlz-acc.pl
[pit080924.007]
The derivation of the base compound’s head guhka-juällge ‘long-leg’ into the
derived form is illustrated in (8).
(8) guhka-juällge → [guhka-juolga]-k ‘long-legger’
long-leg\nom.sg [long-leg]-nmlz\nom.sg [pit080924.007]
2 Due to its frequency and extensive use as a general nominalizer, the nominalizer -k is glossed
simply as nmlz without any additional number to specify it, unlike the other, less frequent
nominalizers described in §10.1.3 through §10.1.5.
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