North Saami and Finnish

This page is for discussing the Northern Sámi and Finnish translator (apertium-sme-fin). Some pending things to think about:

• How are compounds dealt with in Omorfi and in the GTSVN dix files ? Do they always split in the same places ? If not, we probably have to add those that don't as lexicalised entries in the transducers.

Comparisons of Northern Sámi and Finnish

Noun phrases

Both Northern Sámi and Finnish order noun suffixes in this way:

NOUN-Pl-Case-Possessive-CliticParticles

Possessives markers are much less common in Northern Sámi, but morphological analyzers will handle them.

Constituent order within noun phrases is similar:

Det Num Adj+ Noun

Where Det can be either a demonstrative, or possessive pronoun.

Cases

Northern Sámi has 7 cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, locative, illative, comitative, essive

• Accusative and Genitive are often syncretic, except in some numbers and some pronouns.

Finnish has 15 cases (and several additional case-like suffixes only applied to adverbials). This is alot, here are the significant facts to avoid a string of opaque latinate terms:

• Structural cases: 4. nominative, partitive, accusative, genitive
• Locative cases: 6. An internal and external set that show goal, location, and source.
• Stative cases: 2. state, change into state; rarely a third - change from state
• Additional: 2 instructive/instrumental cases (with, without), 1 comitative case (plural only)

Where Finnish distinguishes internality and externality with locative and stative cases, there is no such distinction in Northern Sámi. Northern Sámi uses locative for source and location, and illative for goal.

See also

• /Pending tests