Inari Sami

Notes:

• The central open vowel /ä/ was distinguished only in older Inari Sami. In the modern language, it has merged into the front vowel /a/.

Inari Sami, like the other Samic languages, has fixed word-initial stress. Syllables are furthermore divided into feet, usually consisting of two syllables each, and with secondary stress on the first syllable of every foot. In the other Samic languages the last syllable in a word with an odd number of syllables is not assigned to a foot. In Inari Sami, however, two important changes in the early development of Inari Sami have changed this structure, making the prosodic rhythm quite different:

1. In words with an odd number of syllables, the last two syllables were converted into a foot, leaving the third-last syllable as a foot of its own.
2. The apocope of certain final vowels, in words of three syllables or more, reduced this new final foot to a single syllable.

Consequently, Inari Sami distinguishes prosodically between words that originally ended in a vowel but have undergone apocope, and words that already ended in a consonant in Proto-Samic.

This rearrangement of the foot structure has an effect on the length of vowels and consonants.

In dictionaries, grammars and other linguistic works, the following additional marks are used. These are not used in normal writing.

• A dot is placed below consonants to indicate a half-long consonant: đ̣, j̣, ḷ, ṃ, ṇ, ṇj, ŋ̣, ṛ, ṿ. Some works may instead print the letter in bold, or use a capital letter.
• A vertical line ˈ (U+02C8 MODIFIER LETTER VERTICAL LINE), typewriter apostrophe or other similar mark is placed between consonants to indicate that the preceding consonant is long, and the preceding diphthong is short. It is only used when a diphthong precedes.
• The same mark placed between a diphthong and a consonant indicates that the diphthong is short.
• The same park placed between a single vowel and a consonant indicates that the vowel is half-long.

Consonant gradation is a pattern of alternations between pairs of consonants that appears in the inflection of words. Consonant gradation in Inari Sami is more complex than that of other Sami languages, because of the effects of the unique stress pattern of Inari Sami. Like in other Sami languages, there is a distinction between the strong and weak grade, but a second factor is whether the consonants appear in the middle of a foot (FM) or in the juncture between two feet (FJ). In the latter case, consonants are often lengthened.

Umlaut is a phenomenon in Inari Sami, whereby the vowel in the second syllable affects the quality of the vowel in the first.

The following table lists the Inari Sami outcomes of the Proto-Samic first-syllable vowel, for each second-syllable vowel.

As can be seen, several of the Proto-Samic vowels have identical outcomes before certain second-syllable vowels. Only before Proto-Samic *ē are all vowels distinguishable. For example, Proto-Samic *oa and *ë both appear before *ë as o, while *o and *u both appear as u. In cases where the second-syllable vowel changes, it is necessary to know which series the vowel of a particular word belongs to. For example, juuḥâđ "to drink" has the third-person singular present indicative form juhá, while nuuḥâđ "to end" has nohá; the former originates from Proto-Samic *u, the latter from *o.

A second kind of umlaut also occurs, which operates in reverse: when the first syllable contains a (originating from Proto-Samic *ë) and the second syllable contains á, the second-syllable vowel is backed to a. Thus, the third-person singular present indicative form of moonnâđ "to go" is maṇa (rather than *maṇá), and the illative singular of ahe "age" is ahan (rather than *ahán).

Inari Sami has nine cases, although the genitive and accusative are often the same:

• Nominative
• Genitive
• Accusative
• Locative
• Illative
• Comitative
• Abessive
• Essive
• Partitive

The partitive appears to be a highly unproductive case in that it seems to only be used in the singular. In addition, unlike Finnish, Inari Sami does not make use of the partitive case for objects of transitive verbs. Thus "Mun puurâm leeibi" could translate into Finnish as either "Minä syön leivän" (English: "I'm eating (all of) the bread") or "Minä syön leipää" (I'm eating (some) bread, or generally, I eat bread); this telicity contrast is mandatory in Finnish.

The personal pronouns have three numbers: singular, plural and dual. The following table contains personal pronouns in the nominative and genitive/accusative cases.

The next table demonstrates the declension of a personal pronoun I/we (dual)/we (plural) in the various cases:

Inari Sami verbs conjugate for three grammatical persons:

• first person
• second person
• third person

Inari Sami has five grammatical moods:

• indicative
• imperative
• conditional
• potential
• optative

Inari Sami verbs conjugate for three grammatical numbers:

• singular
• dual
• plural

Inari Sami has two simple tenses:

• past
• non-past

and two compound tenses:

• perfect
• Pluperfect

Inari Sami, like Finnish and the other Sami languages, has a negative verb. In Inari Sami, the negative verb conjugates according to mood (indicative, imperative and optative), person (1st, 2nd, 3rd) and number (singular, dual and plural).

    Ind. pres.                  Imperative                Optative
    sg.      du      pl.        sg.    du      pl.        sg.      du      pl.
1   jie'm    iän     ep      1  –      –       –       1  iällum iäl'loon  iällup
2   jie'h    eppee   eppeđ   2  ele    ellee   elleđ   2  ele    ellee     elleđ   
3   ij       iä'vá   iä      3  –      –       –       3  iä'lus iällus    iällus