Talk:sámi

RFV discussion: November 2014–July 2015
I can't find any reference to this as a separate noun. The usual term for a Sami person seems to be, while is only the genitive form of. —CodeCat 15:33, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

An additional note: Judging from Sámit, it seems that the plural is used to refer to the Sami collectively, as a people. But I haven't seen it used in the singular with this meaning so far. —CodeCat 15:43, 9 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Sámi is unambiguously the accusative-genitive of Sápmi. This word in general is cited to have also the sense "a Sámi person" e.g. at the Neahttadigisánit dictionary, so I suspect citations for that can be found. I suspect someone has been confused with the attributive use of the noun though in adding a lemma for the inflected form. --Tropylium (talk) 16:44, 9 November 2014 (UTC)
 * We are now talking of sámi with minuscule "s". According to Finnish wiktionary (Northern Sami Wiktionary is still in incubator stage) and our entry Sami, sámi is an adjective, which of course does not necessarily exclude other senses. I changed the entry accordingly. --Hekaheka (talk) 18:35, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
 * That's not really any better, I'm afraid. The -m- in "sámi" is a weak-grade consonant, so it doesn't normally appear in the nominative form (gradation in Northern Sami is like Finnish, but all the consonants gradate), while it does appear in the genitive. So I think that and  relate to each other in the same way as Finnish  and  (and quite likely have the same origin too, but that's another matter). The difference is that in Northern Sami, the lowercase version also refers to the people, but only in plural. Maybe the genitive is an exception to that, and this is simply how Northern Sami handles plurale tantum nouns (i.e. no singular forms but there is still a genitive). —CodeCat 19:01, 10 November 2014 (UTC)
 * It's true that sámi is the genitive form of sápmi, but that does not automatically make sámi invalid as a word. Flipping through the scarce information available of Sami language in the internet I found several occasions in which sámi is defined as an adjective. I would assume that the genitive has acquired a new meaning at some point of the development of the language. I'm not a Sami expert but I'm quite certain that you aren't one either. --Hekaheka (talk) 15:23, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
 * It does exist as a word, but I think people are misinterpreting it as a separate lemma. This is not surprising given that many people interested in Sami languages and culture would be speakers of other languages which don't have such things as case systems. If an English speaker saw "suomen kieli" and knew that it meant "Finnish language" then they might be tempted to think that "suomen" is an adjective meaning "Finnish". I suspect something like that may be going on here.
 * My own interpretation is that is a plurale tantum referring to Sami people, but its singular genitive form is used attributively. I think User:Tropylium knows more about this than anyone else, so his views would be welcome. —CodeCat 15:53, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, this is what I was saying: sámi is, in the cited sense, definitely not a lemma. Northern Sami has both attributive and predicative forms of adjectives, the latter are taken as the lemma, and this is an attributive.
 * It'd still take further verification to determine if the adjectival use actually checks out though. I hope our small number of Category:User se-2 people might have better knowledge of this yet. --Tropylium (talk) 17:28, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
 * What do you mean with "In the cited sense not a lemma"? The article was originally written of sámi as if it were a noun. However, based on what I've read, it seemed that it would be an adjective and I have changed the entry accordingly. Are you saying it's not an adjective either? --Hekaheka (talk) 00:56, 12 November 2014 (UTC)
 * We seem to be mixing together far too many different questions by now. Let's try to be explicit about what we are discussing.
 * Semantics.
 * , uppercase, exists in at least one sense: 1. "the land of the Sami people" (proper noun) (NB: not "Lapland", which covers also traditional Finnish and Swedish territories!)
 * The word is moreover used also in two other senses: 2. "Sami" (adjective); 3. "a Sami person" (common noun).
 * Capitalization.
 * I am still not able to take a definite stance on if the two latter senses should be uppercase or lowercase. I have by now checked a couple other dictionaries, which all seem to only report the capitalized (acc. Sámi); I have also checked some grammars, which seem to at least use the word in these senses as the lowercase sápmi (acc. sámi). Probably we should dig into some Sami media for citations.
 * Another question I do not know the answer to is if there is any semantic difference depending on the capitalization.
 * I do know that, "Sami people", is always lowercase.
 * Lemmatization.
 * If it turns out that lowercase sápmi "a Sami person" is valid, then probably sámit "Sami people" needs to be treated as simply its plural, and not a separate plurale tantum (cf. e.g., ).
 * The form ‹sámi› is definitely not a lemma, but merely an inflected form of ‹sápmi›.
 * Am I being clear enough yet?
 * (I think we went off the rails already at the beginning — I interpreted CodeCat as asking whether the accusative deserves an entry as a separate lemma, while I now think she was asking if the meaning "a Sami person" is correct; and then Hekaheka introduced the question of capitalization.) --Tropylium (talk) 11:44, 12 November 2014 (UTC)


 * Based on this discussion, I have created sápmi as an alternative case form of Sápmi, and revised sámi to note that it is an inflected form of sápmi. Tropylium's comments suggest that all of these words are attested in the way they are now presented, unless I have misunderstood. - -sche (discuss) 17:35, 16 July 2015 (UTC)