From: Peter P
Message: 62429
Date: 2009-01-09
>Finnish puskea -to push < PFU *puske -push -stab
>
>
> Good theory, except that because of the initial p- the word can't be
> Germanic (because in Germanic, such a p- would be from PIE b-, and
> those are very rare, so the word is most likely a loan; this was one
> of the criteria Kuhn used to separate suspected Nordwestblock words
> from the rest of the vocabulary of Germanic).
> As you can see from my examples in an earlier mail, the word (or
> rather several seemingly related words) occurs in several languages of
> northern Europe and Asia. It can't be Finno-Ugric, since there is no
> way, seemingly, to derive the three relevant roots derivationally
> within FU (and here comes yet another one:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puukko
> I don't know why I forgot that one, the notion that Finns easily
> resort to knifes is the textbook example in Denmark of previous
> schoolbook ethnic stereotyping);
> it can't be Celtic, since of those languages only the p-Celtic
> subgroup has initial p-, from original kW-, and there is no
> corresponding word in kW-, so it must be either a loan from a
> substrate or adstrate, or a wanderwort, cf. the general usefulness,
> but also the symbolic significance of the puukko.
>
> Perhaps the original forms were
> *pug-
> *pug-l- > *puG-l- > *pul-
> *pug-sk- > *puG-sk- > *pusk-
>
> The -l- and -sk- suffixes exist in NWBlock too.
>
> Torsten
>