Phonetic Duration, Phonological Quantity and Prosodic Structure in Inari Saami

Abstract

Inari Saami, an endangered Finno-Ugric language of Northern Finland, is reported to have a three-way surface contrast in consonant length (short, halflong and long). We studied disyllabic words (C)V1CxV2(C) using data from 5 native speakers under two conditions, with short and long preceding vowel, V1, and found support for the claim that Inari Saami has a ternary contrast in consonant length. The three-way length contrast is more robust following a short V1. The duration of V2 correlates negatively with the length of the medial consonant. However, there is one major departure from this pattern. When both V1 and the medial consonant are long, V2 is also longer. This finding supports the idea that disyllables of this class differ from the others in their prosodic structure in having two metrical feet rather than one. This interpretation tallies with independent evidence from synchronic morphophonology and the historical development of the prosodic system of Inari Saami.

Dialectal variation of duration patterns in Finnmark North Sámi quantity

“…For example, in many Scandinavian languages, a long vowel is always followed by a short consonant, and a long consonant is always preceded by a short vowel. In other languages, the quantity degree might be signalled by a complex complementary relationship between multiple neighboring segments, e.g., in Estonian, Livonian, or Inari S ami (Bye et al, 2009;Lehiste, 1965Lehiste, , 2008Markus et al, 2012;T€ urk et al, 2019). For example, in Estonian there exist rather complex complementarity patterns between the intervocalic consonant and the surrounding vowels (Lehiste, 1960).…”

“…Ternary quantity opposition of consonants, a phonological system where contrasts are signalled by three-way differences in segmental duration, is considered a crosslinguistically extremely rare typological feature (Ladefoged and Maddieson, 1996;McRobbie-Utasi et al, 2007). It is known to occur only in a small number of languages, primarily belonging to the Finnic subgroup of the Uralic family, for example, Estonian and Livonian (Markus et al, 2012), and various S ami languages (Bye et al, 2009). With the exception of Estonian, these Finnic and S ami languages are all seriously endangered or (nearly) extinct, and so is the multitude of various phonetic realizations of this interesting phonological phenomenon.…”

Towards a phonological typology of Uralic languages

“…The development of Saami phonological structures is treated by Korhonen (1981) and Sammallahti (1998aSammallahti ( , 1998b. There are also available a number of studies on phonology of different Saami languages, such as Itkonen (1984), Bye et al (2009), Türk et al (2016) on Inari Saami, McRobbie-Utasi (1999 on Skolt Saami, and Sammallahti (2012) on Ume Saami. The main phonological system of Saami languages is mostly similar to Finnic but they have even more complex durational distinctions (Korhonen 1981).…”

Quantity contrast in Inari Saami: The role of pitch and intensity

“…Only a few studies about quantity in Inari Saami have been carried out and they focus on temporal aspects, e.g., [2,8]. In our recent study [2] it was revealed that in disyllabic words an intervocalic consonant preceded by a phonologically short vowel has three degrees of length: short, half-long or long.…”