Northern Sami dictionary and grammar

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Sean of the Dead
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Northern Sami dictionary and grammar

Postby Sean of the Dead » 2009-05-18, 19:27

Are there any actual dictionaries of Northern Sami online? The Risten one is a piece of crap, it barely has anything, and the PDF is super tiny and also has nothing.

If there are no other online dictionaries going Sami <-> anylanguage, what is the best printed dictionary and grammar book I could buy, preferably in Norwegian or German. English would be best, but I doubt there are many materials for NA available in English.

I am way better at learning languages when focusing on grammar more than phrases, so a grammar oriented course would work a lot better for me, rather than learning colloquial phrases, which would be less helpful, since I doubt I'll be visiting Lapland anytime soon, therefore most of my contact would be on forums.
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Re: Northern Sami dictionary and grammar

Postby yangbowen » 2009-07-08, 6:18

I've just ordered the Norsk-samisk skoleordbok/Dáru-sámi skuvlasátnegirji, which i ordered from this site: http://www.karabok.no/catalog/index.php . We'll see how it is...

I don't know of any really good North Sami dictionaries online, but I have found the following dictionary and wordlist somewhat useful:
http://www.freelang.net/online/sami.php
http://www.uta.fi/~km56049/same/svocab.html

As for grammar, the "liten grammatik" and "samlade övningar" on the Gulahalan site have some very good although limited information in Swedish about North Sami grammar. I'm sure there are actual textbooks with more comprehensive information about the grammar, but as a beginner I have found the grammar covered in Gulahalan to be enough for now. If you want to work with Gulahalan or have worked with Gulahalan but have trouble reading Swedish, here is a good Swedish dictionary: http://lexin2.nada.kth.se/sve-eng.html

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Re: Northern Sami dictionary and grammar

Postby Sean of the Dead » 2010-01-10, 19:19

Does anyone know where I could buy "Bás Prinnsaš"? I love that book and am building a collection in different languages, and I'm going to be learning Northern Sámi with my boyfriend soon, so I'd love to have the book to read when we get good at it. :D
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Re: Northern Sami dictionary and grammar

Postby Duiskanieida » 2010-01-10, 19:33

Sean of the Dead wrote:Does anyone know where I could buy "Bás Prinnsaš"?


(it's Bás Prinssaš) It seems it's been published with WSOY in Finland. So perhaps try to order it through a finnish bookstore?
I have already seen the book several times in the Sámi area (Finland and/or Norway), I mean in shops with Sámi literature.
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Re: Northern Sami dictionary and grammar

Postby Sean of the Dead » 2010-01-10, 20:17

Well, do you know of any Finnish bookstores? I know of none. :oops: Perhaps you could help us look for the book a bit? :)
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Re: Northern Sami dictionary and grammar

Postby yangbowen » 2010-01-12, 0:58

Hi, just thought I'd write a quick review of the Norsk-samisk skoleordbok/Dáru-sámi skuvlasátnegirji from Davvi Girji. I think the worst apsect of the dictionary is that it is only Norwegian-to-Sami. There is no Sami-to-Norwegian section, so it is half worthless! It is also quite thin and by no means comprehensive, although unless you are an advanced student of Sami, the vocabulary in it would probably be enough for you. The dictionary is also expensive by my standards (I live in the US where books are generally not as expensive as in Scandinavia). When I was unemployed for a couple months and had way too much spare time, I started typing the dictionary entries into my computer and translating the Norwegian words into Swedish so that I could look up words more easily (yes, I know I'm a geek and rather serious about learning Sami!), but that project was very tedious and slow-going, and now that I have a life and a job again, I don't have any time for it. Hopefully someday I'll finish it, but it probably won't be anytime soon. Anyway, I would only recommend this dictionary if you don't mind that it only has Norwegian-to-Sami. :?

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Re: Northern Sami dictionary and grammar

Postby Sean of the Dead » 2010-01-12, 1:06

Thanks a lot. :D

Do you happen to have this dictionary? If so, I'd love if you could review it too.
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Re: Northern Sami dictionary and grammar

Postby yangbowen » 2010-01-12, 1:57

Sean of the Dead wrote:Thanks a lot. :D

Do you happen to have this dictionary? If so, I'd love if you could review it too.


No, I don't have that one. It looks way more comprehensive than the Norsk-samisk skoleordbok, which only has 7000 entries, but I don't think it has a Sami-->Norwegian section either. Sad...

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Re: Northern Sami dictionary and grammar

Postby Sean of the Dead » 2010-01-12, 2:21

Well, there is a separate Sami -> Norwegian book, but it's $80 too. ,
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Re: Northern Sami dictionary and grammar

Postby yangbowen » 2010-01-12, 2:49

Ah, that makes sense. Too bad they're so expensive though :shock:

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Re: Northern Sami dictionary and grammar

Postby davidwelsh » 2010-01-13, 23:16

Sean of the Dead wrote:Do you happen to have this dictionary? If so, I'd love if you could review it too.


I just bought this dictionary, along with the Sámi-Norwegian one. The Norwegian-Sámi dictionary has 25,000 headwords and the Sámi-Norwegian 35,000. Both are based on Pekka Sammallahti's Sámi-Finnish Dictionary (1989).

I'm only a beginner, and I haven't used the dictionaries much yet, but they both look really good. The Norwegian-Sámi dictionary shows the consonant gradation for each Sámi word, which I think will be really useful! There are also tables of verb conjugations and noun inflections at the back.

Let me know if you have any more specific questions...
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Re: Northern Sami dictionary and grammar

Postby Sean of the Dead » 2010-01-15, 6:45

davidwelsh wrote:Let me know if you have any more specific questions...

In fact, I do have a question. Do you know where I could buy Bás Prinssaš and get it sent to the USA? :D
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Re: Northern Sami dictionary and grammar

Postby davidwelsh » 2010-01-15, 9:11

Sean of the Dead wrote:
davidwelsh wrote:Let me know if you have any more specific questions...

In fact, I do have a question. Do you know where I could buy Bás Prinssaš and get it sent to the USA? :D


I've looked everywhere online I could think of, and I can't find it for sale anywhere. It's out of print. The only places I found it were the libraries at the Sámi University College and the Sametinget, so maybe you could get it on a international library loan...
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Re: Northern Sami dictionary and grammar

Postby yangbowen » 2010-01-20, 1:46

I forgot to mention: The Norsk-samisk skoleordbok/Dáru-sámi skuvlasátnegirji DOES usually show at least two forms of each noun and verb, so it is possible to see how the consonant gradation and vowel alteration work for most words. For adjectives, both the predicative forms and attributive form are shown. Definitely useful.

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Re: Northern Sami dictionary and grammar

Postby Stevey7788 » 2010-09-16, 22:45

One of the best vocabulary resources ever. YOU can contribute too! http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Swadesh_lists

Imagine a site where you can view standardized word lists of every language on the planet. For free. Check out http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiVocab

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Re: Northern Sami dictionary and grammar

Postby MillMaths » 2012-09-02, 9:57

Stevey7788 wrote:Big Sami dictionary:
http://www.uta.fi/~km56049/same/svocab.html
That's a nice word list. :y: But I don't know what the abbreviation means. :noclue:

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Re: Northern Sami dictionary and grammar

Postby ffrench » 2012-09-02, 9:59

Sophie wrote:
Stevey7788 wrote:Big Sami dictionary:
http://www.uta.fi/~km56049/same/svocab.html
That's a nice word list. :y: But I don't know what the abbreviation means. :noclue:

    gč. (=geahča) cf.
    geahča (=gč.)see, see also

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Re: Northern Sami dictionary and grammar

Postby MillMaths » 2012-09-02, 10:05

Giitu. :)

I was looking particularly at

ráhkesvuohta (gč. ráhkisvuohta) love

ráhkisvuohta (gč. ráhkesvuohta) love
Are the two words ráhkisvuohta and ráhkesvuohta interchangeable? :hmm:

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Re: Northern Sami dictionary and grammar

Postby chung » 2012-09-04, 1:28

Giellatekno seems to have become a lot better over the last couple of years including more dictionaries or word-lists including those for other Finno-Ugric languages (e.g. English <> Komi). I also like its analyzer for Northern Saami as I have found it useful to get the inflectional pattern of a new word.

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Re: Northern Sami dictionary and grammar

Postby Trondtr » 2013-10-30, 21:59

Thank you for positive feedback on Giellatekno work. Unfortunately the link you provided broke after a server reorganisation this autumn. We now have all our dictionaries collected in one place: http://dicts.uit.no/index.eng.html . Note that we have a quite nice dictionary equipped with morphology (click-and-read for inflected words in text) for 10 different Uralic languages, including North Saami to Norwegian and Finnish. Check us out at http://giellatekno.uit.no !

Greetings, Trond Trosterud, Giellatekno, UiT.


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