North Sámi: An Essential Grammar
Abstract
North Sámi: An Essential Grammar is the most up-to-date work on North Sámi grammar to be published in English. The book provides: a clear and comprehensive overview of modern Sámi grammar including examples drawn from authentic texts of various genres. a systematic order of topics beginning with the alphabet and phonology, continuing with nominal and verbal morphology and syntax, and concluding with more advanced topics such as discourse particles, complex sentences, and word formation. full explanations of the grammatical terminology for the benefit of readers without a background in linguistics. Suitable for linguists, as well as independent and classroom-based students, North Sámi: An Essential Grammar is an accessible but thorough introduction to the essential morphology and syntax of modern North Sámi, the largest of the Sámi languages. © 2017 Riitta-Liisa Valijärvi and Lily Kahn. All rights reserved.
... Until recently, phonetic and phonological research on the North Sámi language has focused mostly on its complex morphophonological features (Baal et al., 2012;Kahn & Valijärvi, 2017;Sammallahti, 1998), and on the cross-linguistically rare three-way quantity contrast, which means that there are three phonologically contrastive lengths for segments: short; long; and overlong Magga, 1984;Sammallahti, 1998). Prosodic features related to tonality (tone or intonation) or stress (e.g., word stress) have attracted much less attention by researchers; to our knowledge, there are no experimental studies on the topic. ...
The Finnmark North Sámi is a variety of North Sámi language, an indigenous, endangered minority language spoken in the northernmost parts of Norway and Finland. The speakers of this language are bilingual, and regularly speak the majority language (Finnish or Norwegian) as well as their own North Sámi variety. In this paper we investigate possible influences of these majority languages on prosodic characteristics of Finnmark North Sámi, and associate them with prosodic patterns prevalent in the majority languages. We present a novel methodology that: (a) automatically finds the portions of speech (words) where the prosodic differences based on majority languages are most robustly manifested; and (b) analyzes the nature of these differences in terms of intonational patterns. For the first step, we trained convolutional WaveNet speech synthesis models on North Sámi speech material, modified to contain purely prosodic information, and used conditioning embeddings to find words with the greatest differences between the varieties. The subsequent exploratory analysis suggests that the differences in intonational patterns between the two Finnmark North Sámi varieties are not manifested uniformly across word types (based on part-of-speech category). Instead, we argue that the differences reflect phrase-level prosodic characteristics of the majority languages.
... The Sámi people live on ancestral lands in what is named, the Sápmi region of Fennoscandia which comprises northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Murmansk Oblast of Russia and speak a Finno-Ugric language also called 'Sámi' (Valijärvi & Kahn, 2017). The Sámi language reflects much of their specialized knowledge of the environment and of their relationship with the animals that they herd, trap, and fish. ...
Ethnobotanical research provides ample justification for comparing diverse biological nomenclatures and exploring ways that retain alternative naming practices. However, how (and whether) comparison of nomenclatures is possible remains a subject of discussion. The comparison of diverse nomenclatural practices introduces a suite of epistemic and ontological difficulties and considerations. Different nomenclatures may depend on whether the communities using them rely on formalized naming conventions; cultural or spiritual valuations; or worldviews. Because of this, some argue that the different naming practices may not be comparable if the ontological commitments employed differ. Comparisons between different nomenclatures cannot assume that either the naming practices or the object to which these names are intended to apply identifies some universally agreed upon object of interest. Investigating this suite of philosophical problems, I explore the role grey nomenclatures play in classification. 'Grey nomenclatures' are defined as those that employ names that are either intentionally or accidently non-Linnaean. The classification of the lichen thallus (a symbiont) has been classified outside the Linnaean system by botanists relying on the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants (ICN). But, I argue, the use of grey names is not isolated and does not occur exclusively within institutionalized naming practices. I suggest, 'grey names' also aptly describe nomenclatures employed by indigenous communities such as the Samí of Northern Finmark, the Sherpa of Nepal, and the Okanagan First Nations. I pay particular attention to how naming practices are employed in these communities; what ontological commitments they hold; for what purposes are these names used; and what anchors the community's nomenclatural practices. Exploring the history of lichen naming and early ethnolichenological research, I then investigate the stakes that must be considered for any attempt to preserve, retain, integrate, or compare the knowledge contained in both academically formalized grey names and indigenous nomenclatures in a way that preserves their source-specific informational content.
Samuli Paulaharju was a Finnish ethnographer who visited the Kven minority in Northern Norway – Ruija – in the 1920s and 1930s. Together with his wife Jenny he collected ethnographic material among the Kvens, and corresponded frequently with some of them. Many wrote in Finnish, and most were self-taught writers.
We focus on the orthography used by these writers who were writing in a multilingual environment. We identify two writing cultures, one associated with Old Literary Finnish and Early Modern Finnish, the other with Modern Written Finnish (MWF). The orthography used by the former is characterized by the use of b , d , g for p , t , k in native Finnish words, which we attribute to influence from Norwegian. By contrast, the orthography of the latter largely resembles the MWF of the time. However, both groups substitute t for d – a phenomenon found in Finland during the same time period – as well as occasionally use Norwegian characters.
Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) is a theory of language in which linguistic structures are accounted for in terms of the interplay of discourse, semantics and syntax. With contributions from a team of leading scholars, this Handbook provides a field-defining overview of RRG. Assuming no prior knowledge, it introduces the framework step-by-step, and includes a pedagogical guide for instructors. It features in-depth discussions of syntax, morphology, and lexical semantics, including treatments of lexical and grammatical categories, the syntax of simple clauses and complex sentences, and how the linking of syntax with semantics and discourse works in each of these domains. It illustrates RRG's contribution to the study of language acquisition, language change and processing, computational linguistics, and neurolinguistics, and also contains five grammatical sketches which show how RRG analyses work in practice. Comprehensive yet accessible, it is essential reading for anyone who is interested in how grammar interfaces with meaning.
This paper presents sixteen different string figures, tricks and knots that were collected in 1939 by Paul-Émile Victor among the north-western Saami. The collection had been offered for publication in a Swedish periodical shortly before WWII, but it was not actually published, in a French periodical, until 1976, when Yves Delaporte prepared Victor's original manuscript. Comparative remarks accompany each figure.
This article deals with estimative (also called ‘tropative’) constructions meaning ‘find/consider X to be Y ’, where Y stands for a noun or an adjective. It systematically investigates morphological estimatives and their relationship to causative, applicative and denominal derivations from synchronic and diachronic perspectives. In addition, the article presents a survey of periphrastic estimative strategies in the world’s languages.
This paper investigates the body’s role in grammar in argument sequences. Drawing from a database of public disputes on language use, we document the work of the palm-up gesture in action formation. Using conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, we show how this gesture is an interactional resource that indexes a particular epistemic stance—namely to cast the proposition being advanced as obvious. In this report, we focus on instances in which participants reach what we refer to as an ‘impasse’, at which point the palm up gesture becomes a resource for reasserting and pursuing a prior position, now laminated with an embodied claim of ‘obviousness’ that is grounded in the sequentiality of the interaction. As we show, the palm up gesture appears with and in response to a variety of syntactic and grammatical structures, and moreover can also function with no accompanying verbal utterance at all. This empirical observation challenges the assumption that a focus on grammar-in-interaction should begin with, or otherwise be examined in relation to, ‘standard’ verbal-only grammatical categories (e.g., imperative, declarative). We conclude by considering the gestural practice we focus on alongside verbal grammatical resources (specifically, particles) from typologically distinct languages, which we offer as a contribution to ongoing discussions regarding an embodied conceptualization of grammar—in this case, epistemicity.
Ternary length contrast is a rare phonological feature, investigated here both in terms of its realization and possible undergoing changes. In North Sámi, a phonetically under-documented and endangered Fenno-Ugric language spoken by indigenous people in Northern Europe, the ternary quantity contrast is assumed to be signalled by a progressive lengthening of a consonant and a compensatory shortening of the previous vowel. This study evaluates this assumption and compares the realization of the length contrasts in two dialects, the Western and Eastern Finnmark North Sámi. The results show that while the contrast between the short and the two longer quantities is robustly signaled regardless of the dialect, the durational differences between the two longer quantities are maintained only in the Eastern dialect. On the other hand, a vowel quantity contrast independent of the quantity of the following consonant is present in the Western but not in the Eastern dialect. Further, comparing the phonetic realization of the ternary quantity contrast for speakers of different ages presents evidence of a language change: the results indicate an ongoing neutralization of the ternary contrast in younger speakers, which points to a possible disappearance of this rare typological feature in Finnmark North Sámi.
Orten Närpes i västra Finland har under senare år presenterats som ett särskilt lyckat exempel på integration, med hög sysselsättningsgrad och täta kontakter mellan migranter och andra ortsbor. Svenskan är minoritetsspråk i Finland men majoritetsspråk i Närpes, och därmed även det språk i vilket migranter erbjuds integrationskurser. I denna artikel granskar författarna integrationen i Närpes utgående från ett intervjumaterial med 23 informanter som har flyttat till Närpes från olika länder. Artikelförfattarna tillämpar Alistair Agers och Alison Strangs modell för integration och granskar hur sysselsättning och utbildning, sociala kontakter, språk och kulturella särdrag samt trygghet och stabilitet ter sig ur migranters perspektiv.
Sami: An Introduction to the Language and Culture
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Klaus Peter and Pekka Sammallahti
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Tor Magne, Mariana Blind, and Per Stefan Labba
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Also available at http://www.ur.se/webbplatser/gulahalan/
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Also available at http://www.ur.se/webbplatser/gulahalan/
Guttorm, Inga, Johan Jernsletten, and Klaus Peter Nickel. 1992. Davvin 4 volumes. Oslo:
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I du e duoddaris! L robok i nordsamiska
- Cecilia Hedlund
- Lars-Gunnar Larsson
Hedlund, Cecilia and Lars-Gunnar Larsson. 2011. I du e duoddaris! L robok i nordsamiska.
Uppsala: Uppsala universitet.
S mi-suoma-s mi s tnegirji/Saamelais-suomalainen-saamelainen sanakirja
- Pekka Sammallahti
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sanakirja. Utsjoki: Girjegiis.