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Revisiting the Most Improbable Baltic Loanwords in Finnic

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Revisiting the Most Improbable Baltic Loanwords in Finnic M $$" A COLLECTION OF FORGOTTEN ETYMOLOGIES: REVISITING THE MOST IMPROBABLE BALTIC LOANWORDS IN FINNIC SANTERI JUNTTILA Summary The Finnic languages have an ancient loanword stock from Baltic, as proven already by Vilhelm Thomsen in 1869. Still, the period and location of the prehistoric contacts have not been satisfactorily established. A list of 202 old Baltic loanwords into Proto-Finnic has been presented by Seppo Suhonen in 1988. There are, however, 299 more Baltic etymologies suggested up to 1988 that Suhonen hasn’t included in his list. This article aims to analyze whether some of these forgotten or abandoned etymologies might prove correct in the light of recent research in the field of historical lexicology. The analysis consists of three parts: distribution and alternative explanations; phonology; and semantics. 121 out of 282 analyzed etymologies failed the test. Most of the remaining 161 also seem problematic, but several of them will certainly be accepted after a thorough etymologic analysis in the future. Introduction The oldest contacts between Baltic and Finnic languages were first demon- strated by the studies of the famous Danish linguist Vilhelm Thomsen in 1869 and 1890. Since then, hundreds of Finnic word stems have been claimed to be of Baltic origin. Most of these etymologies, however, can’t be found in any etymological dictionary or in other reference literature. This article aims to re-introduce these old etymologies as an index and briefly examine them in the light of research available in current etymological dictionaries. The Baltic languages The Baltic (Ba) languages belong to the Indo-European (IE) language family, but their status as a separate IE branch has been a matter of dispute since the very beginning of Indo-European studies. The status has to be defined ac- cording to their relation to the close Slavic language group. The most con- vincing view, first presented by Ivanov and Toporov in 1958, is to see Proto- Slavic as just one of the three daughter languages of Proto-Baltic, or better, Proto-Balto-Slavic, the remaining two being W (or Peripheral) Ba and E (or Central) Ba. However, the existence of a Balto-Slavic branch versus two sepa- rate branches connected just by mutual contacts still remains a subject of dis- cussion. 78 SANTERI JUNTTILA Today there are 4 living E Ba languages: Lithuanian, Latvian, Samogitian and Latgallian, though Samogitian is often mentioned as a dialect of Lithua- nian and Latgallian as a dialect of Latvian. The oldest remaining written Ba documents, dating from about 1350 AD are of W Baltic Old Prussian, extinct since the 17th or 18th century. The relatively young age of Ba literacy, in addi- tion to the conservativeness of the Ba languages forms an obstacle for a his- toric linguist to reconstruct the past, especially in terms of absolute chronol- ogy. The Finnic languages The Finnic (Fi) language branch belongs to the Uralic language family, form- ing its W sub-group together with the Sami and Mordvin branches (accord- ing to Kallio 2006 and Häkkinen 2009). The status and definition of the Fi branch is undisputed, but the definition of its internal division into languages and dialects has changed considerably in the last two decades. Today there are 12 Fi idioms generally defined as languages: Finnish, Meä, Kven, Ingrian, Karelian, Lude, Veps, Vote, Estonian, Võro, Seto and Livonian. However, this division is and remains political, since it is not possible to divide the branch into well-defined single languages based on purely linguistic arguments. 1 Despite a long history of attempts, the task of reconstructing the develop- ment from Proto-Finnic to the modern Fi languages remains as challenging as the aforementioned defining of the relation between Baltic and Slavic. The written sources do not help us very much here either: the first Fi text, which dates from the 13th century is merely a few words on a birch-bark letter, while Estonian and Finnish literatures came only after the Reformation. The mod- ern standard Fi languages represent mostly later secondary divisions of an older dialect continuum: the differences within Finnish are particularly enor- mous, and its main division into W, E and N dialects has been a crucial aspect in considering the Fi prehistory. The oldest Baltic-Finnic contacts According to different scholars there are 100 (Carpelan 1984: 100, which was based on a misinterpretation of Itkonen 1961: 101) to 550 (Liukkonen 1999) ancient Ba loanwords in Finnic. The number has rarely been mentioned, but even the few calculations striving to exactness vary between 142 certain stems plus 37 uncertain stems (Suhonen 1984: 211) and 188 certain stems plus 186 uncertain stems (Vaba 1990b: 125). The borrowings seem to have spread rather evenly within the whole Fi branch, and gone through all the phonetic changes from Proto-Finnic to the present Fi languages. This has been seen as sufficient proof of the contacts earlier than the first split of Proto-Finnic (as 1 About the discussion see Junttila 2010. .
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