Documenting Lule Sami
Contents
Gerund
Gerund I: while..., at the same time as... something happens at the same time as the doing the predicate verb is expressing.
sån oaddá-j bårå-dijn = he fell asleep while eating
-dijn - used after the last vowel of the week stem of a pair-syllabic verb
Ex: jåhte-t -> jåde-dijn (= while moving)
- used after the last vowel of the stem of a contracted verb
Ex: tjieggi-t -> tjieggi-dijn (= while travelling)
...(a)-ttjin - used after the last vowel of an unpair-syllabic verb (the last stem vowel changes to '-a')
Ex: tjåhkani-t -> tjåhkana-ttjin (= while assembling)
Gerund II: someone is doing something or a doing is going on, keeps on, or somethin has started but is not finished. Is used with AUX liehke-t (= to be). Compare: 'He is reading'.
sån la låhkå-min = he is reading
-min - used after the last vowel of the strong stem of a pair-syllabic verb
Ex: sån la goarro-min (= she is sewing)
- used after the last vowel of a contract verb:
Ex: sån la guolli-min (= she is fishing)
-me - used after the last vowel of an unpair-syllabic verb
Ex: sån la malesti-me (= he is cooking)
Kristin (examples from Spiik)
Derivations
oahpásmuvvat: oahpás- is an ADJ ('oahpás-' in compounds, 'oahpes' (ATT) otherwise)
- muvva-t (with ILL: to become what the word says: get to know (people and concrete things), get customed to, get experience with, get familiar with.
(- tuvva-t (with COMIT): to become what the word says: learn to know).
It should be possible to note somewhere that the verb(s) is derived from an ADJ.
There are words thats start out as verbs > is derived into nouns > is again derived into another verb...
Maybe there should be one more level for derivations only? The translation is of no help: while oahpás- is an ADJ in ATT form, known is a V in PERF.PART form. Translation gives us only sketchy semantics.
Kristin
Norvagisms
oahpásmuvvat doarromuseajn - oahpásmuvvat takes ILL, but here is used COMIT. (Ájluovta skåvlå buosjes...)
Ájluovta skåvlå buosjes oahppe vas Svierigis vadtsin
Here is the printing-friendly page in the Lokalavisa NordSalten:
http://www.nord-salten.no/nyheter/samisk/ajluovta_skavla_buosjes_oahppe_vas_svierigis_vadtsin#tips
It is possible to put it somewhere.
Notes
I remember there was a place where it was possible to write comments on the grammar in the sentence analysed. There should be such a place. For the sentence above, I would comment the norvagism.
Adjectives
We need gloss tags ATT for attributive form and PRED for predicative form of the adjectives. Some forms are equal in both forms - then perhaps, it is sufficient to mark it only with ADJ pos.
Kristin
Use of the Supinum
| Iŋŋga: |
| Iŋŋgá: |
| Inggá:NOMSG |
| Np |
| Mån |
| mån |
| I1SGNOM |
| PN |
| dal |
| dal |
| now |
| ADVtemp |
| biejav | |
| bieja | v |
| put | 1SGPRES |
| Vtr | |
| mállásav | |
| mállása | v |
| dinner | ACCSG |
| N | |
| duoldatjit | ||
| duolda | tji | t |
| cook | for | INF |
| V | ||
How should one annotate the suffix -tji in the above sentence.
Kristin suggests to use 'supinum'. I am not so sure that is is right. As far as I know the supinum
is one of the infinite forms if LS next to the infinitive, the gerund, the participle forms and others.
But is -tji the marker of an infinite form?
Dorothee
OK: -t is the infinitive marker. The 'supinum' is the -tji- pluss the infinitive marker. May be it is better to say that 'supinum' is tjit? But then we mask that -t is a marker of infinitive. The form is infinite: it exists only in the infinitive form ('-t').
Kristin
last edits
SAAMI PEOPLE
Saami has been spoken on the Scandinavian and Kola Peninsulas in Northwest Europe since prehistoric times. This is not a correct statement. So it has to go.
Linguists currently recognize 9 living Saami languages
"Note that the Sea Saami no longer have an independent language, but have adopted North Saami, Lule Saami or Norwegian."
"no longer have an independent language"? Well, Sea Saami have never "had" an independent language. What does this mean?
Sea Saami is an independent language which today is talked by old people in Kvænangen and Western Finnmark, but by far more people in Eastern Finnmark.
Sea Saami has not a own written language, but this lacs also Pite Saami and Ume Saami.
Concerning the following sentence and the paragraph that contains it in the main text:
"This long history and the fact that they are usually not mutually intelligible makes them different languages, not different dialects as they are often mistakenly described."
it seems that the referent of the demonstrative in the sentence above should be 'Saami languages', but that did not come out well I think. Yet. it would be nice to get an answer to the question, why LS is called a language rather than a dialect of Saami! Another thing is that I guess nobody would really claim that Estonian, Finish and Saami are the same language. So one probably does not have to assert that! It also seems to me that the next statement does not really follow. But if in fact it is true that Saami is an older language than the Germanic and the Romance language then there should be a reference to a known scholar claiming that!!
BTW, is it true that the Romance language family is half as old as the Germanic, does not quite sound right? We definitely need references if we want to leave this sentence in the text. I would simply opt for omitting it. It is not central to our concern.
Dorothee
I do not know of any knowledge that says Saami is 'older' than other languages. This way of thinking about languages is absurd! - Languages change all the time, and at one point they have been through so many quantitative changes (many small changes) that it experiences a change in quality. In Norwegian there were quantitative changes after the Great Plauge which resulted in a quantitative change around 1550: New Norwegian was a fact (the name in opposition to Old Norwegian - or Norse).
If we go thousand years back, the Saami languages (or dialect groups) were more near (similiar) than today. I suppose Pekka Sammallahti is one that knows a lot about this. In his book "The Saami Languages" he writes also about diacrony.
If we compare today's Saami languages with Norwegian and the languages N. is related too, the older all-Sami language (do not remember what it is called just now) may be compared with Germanic. I can look up when mayor changes have taken place in the history of the Saami languages, - but this will still not 'prove' anything in a discussion of 'how old' Saami languages are. It tells only of when linguists will consider a change to be a change of quality.
So may be we quit talking about 'old' languages...
Dialects vs. languages:
There are dialects that are more different from each other than the Saami languages. There are languages that are 'identical' - just with minor differences.
I (when I talk about it!) explain Saami to have three main language groups: Eastern Saami Languages group, Central Saami Languages group, and Southern Saami Languages group. Sea Saami, Inari Saami, North Saami, Lule Saami and Pite Saami belongs to the Central Saami Languages group. The Central Saami Languages group have quantity change in common. There are 10 different tounges of Saami - and each of them can be divided in dialectal groups (see Sammallahti). Differrent language groups is one factor that counts for conidering South Saami and East (Skolt) Saami as different 'languages' than the languages belonging in the Central Saami Languages group.
These Saami languages are written with different orthography: Latin and cyrillic - and several different solutions at least for the latin alphabets. So in Norway East Saami, North Saami, Lule Saami and South Saami are all written with different alphabet (Pite Saami and Ume Saami I do not know about in modern written form). This situation makes communication between the different Saami groups difficult. This is a second factor that makes these languages considered 'languages' and not dialects.
Neighbouring Saami dialects are not so different that it is a hindrance for mutual understanding, but the dialects are gradually decreasing in mutual intelligibility. Samis have 80% of their vocabulary in common, but the semantics of the words can differ substantially; then comes differences in syntax, morphology and phonology. Samis talk their own language inside their own group, outside the group the majority language is usually used. Lack of mutual intelligibility is a third factor.
Kristin
previous discussion
Hi Kristin and Svenn Egil,
This will be our project page!!! (click back to article)
It's purpose is ofc to report on the annotation of Lule Saami texts that we do, but written up in a way that it is interesting to all ppl interested in languages or Lule Saami or both.
NOT JUST LINGUISTS
We should make sure that this becomes a page that has information that cannot be found on the Wikipedia or any other well known web information source.
Moreover, it should be interesting and beautiful information - so not too much text; instead some text made attractive by pictures, music files, cool links, and also with a internal link to your personal page in this TC wiki so that ppl can see who the ppl are that annotate Lule Saami... and so forth.
Here now some links and text snippets that I found interesting in this connection:
http://boreale.konto.itv.se/laante.htm http://boreale.konto.itv.se/samieng1.htm
Bluegreen: LuleSami. Mountain and ForestSami culture in Norway and Sweden, many famous handicrafters and chanters from this group, language is locally quite strong. Separate educational institutions with several textbooks in the language, but not for all subjects teached. A small number of books are published each year in this language. Traditional and present day cultural center: Jokkmokk, Sweden.
Kristin: We cannot use information that tells us that Lule Sami culture is a mountain and Forest Sami Culture in Norway! This concerns only Samis on the Swedish side of the border.
On the Norwegian side of the border we find a Costal Sami culture - that differs from Costal Sami Culture further north!
I can write shortly about this.
Webmasters note:
As a curiosity I'd like to mention that there's one Sami word that has made it into several of the major languages of this world, that word is Tundra -doesn't it speak volumes about which part of the world this is. :)
When Nils-Aslak Valkeapää in his book The Sun—my Father (1991), chooses to create a metaphorical poem of a migrating herd of reindeer and uses [in his poem] some of the wealth of names that exist in Sami to describe the reindeer’s appearance, age and sex, he does so not only to demonstrate the wealth of terminology within the Sami language—he does something beyond that: He plays with the language, conjuring up concepts that have never been used before in that fashion. He conceives, in a sense, new fictional animals by combining familiar words in new ways. And he creates different reindeer which, in terms of their being a part of the herd or outside of it, can easily be viewed as parallels to the artist and his or her position in society, as well as to all human beings in their common experiences of being part of a "flock" or alone.
To this wealth of words can be added a great number of Sami onomatopoetical expressions for sounds pertaining to migration, words for working the herd, for the baying of dogs,and the sounds of a thousand hoofs on frozen ground, for undulating moors over which reindeer horns move, for the sound of bells that, like a blanket of clouds, lift the sky up and give the basis for life in these northern regions. And, as if that isn’t enough, there are allusions to the Sami national anthem, and tracks left behind by the herd, both concrete tracks where it has walked and abstract tracks for us, the readers, to follow back into history. Whether we journey with the herd or only pass by it as we wander, it is impossible for us to survive into the future without the tracks, without nature: The River of Life, the daughter of spring, sap, the mosquito maidens and "the sun/red and warm/moved happiness/ into the morning." Because "nothing remains of us/but a yoik in the singing wind/a dream about being." But even so: "and time does not exist, no end, none/and time is, eternal, always, is," and we are all part of "the life’s circle/infinite/without/beginning/or end/fulfills/changes/colors"…"the horizon’s red dawn/ the starry peaks."
taken from: http://weberstudies.weber.edu/archive/archive%20C%20Vol.%2016.2-18.1/Vol.%2016.2/haraldgaski.html
At the beginning it might be confusing to edit this wiki, but I can tell you that one learns it rather fast :=) I used the following link to get the information I needed: