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 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.
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.
