At 01:14 2000-02-01 -0800, you wrote:
>
>
>Could these Indo-iranian loan words have come into Finno-Saami with the
>introduction of Reindeer herding from across the Urals a fair while
>after the contact with Balts and Germans. Certainly reindeer herding
>is supposedly adopted first by Samoyeds in contact with Indo-iranians,
>who coppied their use of the horse. This spread of technology could
>probably spread Iranian loan words that could have entered Samoyed
>languages, especially if associated with reindeer herding technology.
>
>Has there been any research on this Tommy?
>
>Regards
>
>John
>
>
I don't think this is likely, most of the indo-iranian loanwords are common
to Saamic and Finnish (though some such as porsa "pig", are absent from
Saamic for obvious reasons), and they mostly have northing to do with
reindeer. The Finns by the way have never herded reindeer to any large
extent. Also there is a great deal of uncertainty as to when the Saami
actually started herding reindeer. Large-scale reindeer herding in
Scandinavia is first mentioned by Othere in the 9th century, but he was
Norse and owned the reindeer himself. Some authorities think that large
scale reindeer herding by the saami only started in th 17th century, though
they undoubtedly kept small numbers of domesticated reindeer long before
this, perhaps mainly to attract wild reindeer for hunting.
Also one must remember that the virtual exclusive association between saami
and reindeer is a very recent phenomenon. In Sweden it only dates to the
Reindeer Grazing Act of 1894 which gave the saami sole grazing rights.
Before that date the saami owned less than half the reindeer i Härjedalen
province for example.
There are a number of words that saamic shares only with samoyedic (or
rather nenets), but since the proto-saami and proto-nenets would probably
have lived at the NW and NE ends of the Protouralic area these might simply
be "North Protouralic" words.
Tommy