A grammar of Pite Saami, 2014

4 Morphological patterns and word classes
This being the case, some speakers from farther north may have further voiced
plosive phonemes /bː dː gː/ that only occur in consonant gradation alternations
with the corresponding unvoiced phonemes /pː tː kː/. However, it is not clear
based on the corpus data how widespread this feature is, or if it also affects geminate
affricates.
Finally, it is not clear from the corpus data what the status of the phonological
contexts lacking consonant gradation mentioned in Sammallahti (1998: 21)
(working from a historical perspective and with older data) is. Further research
is needed to complete the picture, and variation within Pite Saami and possible
effects of language attrition should also be taken into consideration.
4.1.2.2 Umlaut
The term umlaut refers to regular allomorphic alternations of the vowels in the
V1 position of a stem. 5 The two umlaut patterns attested in the corpus are listed
in Table 4.3.
Table 4.3: The two attested umlaut patterns
IPA orthography
ɛ ↔ e ä ↔ ie
u͡a ↔ o ua/uä ↔ uo
These umlaut alternations are qualitative and not quantitative. These alternations
are not triggered by the phonological environment, but instead morphologically.
The allomorph /ɛ/ in the first pattern is found in the same paradigmatic
slots for each inflectional class as /u͡a/ 6 in the second pattern, just as the allomorphs
/e/ and /o/ also correspond to the same paradigmatic slots. Word forms
for bägge ‘wind’ in (9) and for buälldet ‘burn’ in (10) provide examples of the two
umlaut patterns.
(9) /bɛgːa/ /begːa/
bägga biegga
wind\nom.sg wind\nom.pl
[pit080621]
5 Cf. §2.2.2 on prosodic positions, including V1 position.
6 Note that /u͡a/ has an allomorph [u͡ɛ] triggered by purely phonological vowel harmony;
cf. §3.2.1.9.
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