Sky loaned

E.G.Pulleyblank: The Hsiung-nu
'Only direct linguistic evidence can be of value in solving the problem of the Hsiung-nu language. Unfortunately there is only a small body of material available for investigating this question. There are many Hsiung-nu words in Chinese transcription but most of them are proper names or titles of which the meanings are unknown. The corpus of words for which Chinese translations are provided is quite limited. Efforts to connect these words with the major languages that later dominated the eastern steppes have not been very successful.
One word which early attracted attention was ch'eng-li, EMC thraïn,j-li < *thárn,-ri (?), "heaven". Every one agrees that this must be etymologically the same word as Turkish tängri, Mongol tenggeri, tngri. Pelliot (1944) has, however, given good arguments for thinking that it is a loan word in both Turkish and Mongolian. If this is correct, the word is probably one of the many cultural elements borrowed from the Hsiung-nu by the later steppe empires and may actually be evidence that the Hsiung-nu language was not closely related to either Turkish or Mongolian.'

Alexander Vovin
Did the Xiongnu Speak a Yeniseian Language?
'Most recently, Stefan Georg provided an excellent etymological analysis of Turko-Mongolian tengri/tngri "sky" [The word is also attested in Xiongnu as .. .. *thang-rij], cogently demonstrating that it goes back to a hybrid of PY *tïn,gVr- "high" plus Turkic possessive suffix -i/-ï/-u/-ü [Georg, S.: Türkisch/Mongolisch tengri 'Himmel, Gott' und seine Herkunft. In: Studia Etymologica Cracoviensia Vol. 6 (2001), pp. 83-100.].'

Now note these inflection paradigms in Finnish

"house"
talo
talon
taloa
talossa
talosta
taloon
talolla
talolta
talolle
talona
taloksi

and
"human"
ihminen
ihmisen
ihmistä
ihmisessä
ihmisestä
ihmiseen
ihmisellä
ihmiseltä
ihmiselle
ihmisenä
ihmiseksi

but
taivas
taivaan
taivasta
taivaassa
taivaasta
taivaaseen
taivaalla
taivaalta
taivaalle
taivaana
taivaaksi

note nom. -s and lengthened suffix vowel
outside of nominative and partitive.

Similarly
rengas
renkaan
rengasta
renkaassa
renkaasta
renkaaseen
renkaalla
renkaalta
renkaalle
renkaana
renkaaksi

which makes one wonder if all loans from the PIE thematic declension ended in this particular Finnish paradigm. Anyone know?


Torsten