North Saami and Finnish

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

• How are compounds dealt with in Omorfi and in the GTSVN analysers ? 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.

• Fred Karlsson's constraint grammar for Finnish has been GPL'd, and is available and undergoing conversion to CG3 here: https://victorio.uit.no/langtech/trunk/kt/fin/src

• How can we restrict generation of alternative forms in the Sámi generator ? In lttoolbox this is done with LR (only analyse)/RL (only generate) markings.

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.
• Comitative and Essive are the same in singular and plural

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 (3 cases each) that show goal, location, and source.
• Stative cases: 2. state, goal state; rarely a third - source 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. Thus, cases can roughly be transfered this way:

• (fin) Internal Source, Internal Location, External Source, External Location → Locative
• (fin) Internal Goal, External Goal → Illative
• (fin) Partitive, Accusative, Genitive → AccGen

Of course, the last set ending in AccGen will have to be distinguished with certain numbers and pronouns.

Adjectives

Adjectives in Northern Sámi can have two separate forms depending on whether they are attributive or predicative. The attributive adjectives mostly do not agree in number with the head noun, but predicative adjectives do. Attributive adjectives do not agree in case with the head noun.

In Finnish, adjectives always agree in number and case with the head noun, and agree in number when they occur in predicates (although there is some variation as to whether or not the predicative adjective is partitive plural or nominative plural).

See also

• /Pending tests