Re: Felice Vinci's "Homer in the Baltic" theory: linguistic deconstr

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Francesco Brighenti" <frabrig@...> wrote:

> Since you are Scandinavian (Norwegian?), I ask you a question. In my notes on Vinci's linguistic comparisons posted at the Files section I write at some point:
>
> > The name of the rocky island of Lyökki off the southwest coast of
> > Finland appears to mean just... _onion_! The Finnish term
> > lyökki 'onion' is a loan from Swedish lök 'id.'; additionally, we may
> > note that the Swedish name of the locality is Lökö.
>

Swede, actually. My webreader doesn't give your representation of the letter ö properly. I guess you wrote o with a trema.

Yes, "lök" is "onion", a special Germanic root exported into Slavic
"luku" and represented in English by "leek" (porrum) and German "Lauch".

Hellqvist p.444 (http://runeberg.org/svetym/0532.html) says that the possible IE connexion might be *lug "bend" as in Greek "lygos" = bendable branch.

He also mentions the loaned root "lauka-" in Finnish which represents well the common origin of ö (o with trema) from diphthong au in modern Swedish.

If the etymology of the toponym is from "onion" or even "flexibilis" is unfortunately beyond my capacity to judge.

Best wishes
Lars