Re: PIE suffix =t in food?

> the existence of Khowar òhts 'bear' (which never had a- and didn't get ts < Cy) makes it likely that Finnish otso \ ohto (etc.) was borrowed from an Indo-Iranian l. like Kh, possibly even proto-Kh.

Khowar in particular still has the same couple issues brought up last time.

1) It is not spoken anywhere near Finnic
2) This form does not explain the Mordvinic cognates (Erzya _ovto_, Moksha _ofta_) which lack an affricate.
3) The occurrence of /ts/ here is an unrelated coincidence since _otso_ is a literary Finnish hypercorrection for _ohto_
4) As noted by Francesco B, apparently the actual Khowar form is _orc._ anyway: http://tinyurl.com/392fyzu

> Finnish borrowings from Indo-Iranian are known, and the existence (even in ancient sources) of many odd (in comp. to most modern) Indo-Iranian l. in NE Europe increases this likelihood.

In general this does seem like a good approach to the various layers of II loans in Uralic, much of which are of rather localized distribution. Specific evidence includes Samic *oarjé (< *orja) "south" vs. Finnic *orja "slave", which seem to have been loan'd under different circumstances, hence the wildly different semantics; or the word for "iron": Mordvinic E, M _ks^n´i_ seems to reflect an original close to Avestan (rt > s^?), while Permic *kort shows the bare root, and Mari *kYrtn´i represents an intermediate form or derivational influence from Mordvinic.

_j.