Substrate hand

A paragraph from Schrijver's 'Lost Languages in Northern Europe':

"
A second example of direct contact between the language of geminates
and a branch of Uralic is the Germanic word hand (Gothic handus etc.)
< Proto-Germanic *hand-. All attempts at an Indo-European etymology of
this word remain unconvincing (see recently Kluge & Seebold 1989:
353). Yet if we take Grimm's and Verner's Laws into account, we may
reconstruct *hand- as *kant-. This looks strikingly like a cognate of
Proto-Finno-Ugric *käti 'hand, arm', but with a nasal infixed into the
root. Since this nasalization is not a feature of Finno-Ugric, or of
Indo-European (outside the nasal presents, that is), and since it is a
feature of the language of geminates, it is reasonable to conclude
that Finno-Ugric *käti was borrowed by the language of geminates, from
which it subsequently entered Germanic before Verner's Law and Grimm's
Law.
"

proto-Finno-Ugric *käti
Ume Saami giahta
Finnish käsi (oblique stem käte-)
Erzya Mordva kedJ
Hill Mari kit (oblique stem kids-)
Udmurt ki
Sosva Mansi kaat
Hungarian keez (oblique stem käzä-),

Note fortition of *t -> -ht- in Saami


Torsten