Re: Uralic Loanwords in Germanic

> If you weren't actually saying they were unrelated, so no one would think kantele and *kantlo- were related, what was the joke?

One interpretation of the joke is pretty clear: since we can outline an IE etymology, maybe it's actually a loan from Polish to Finnic? ;)

> I'd also add, if you did take Piotr's message seriously, that he once was open to the consideration that F Suomi << Indic *ks.oom 'earth', which is similar in its lack of certainty and its need for assumptions to my *kantli:x \ *kantla:x >> kítharis \ kithára: (in this case, I'd say the former was actually much less likely than the latter, since F Suomi < suo + maa 'swamp land' or 'fen land' is nearly certain).

You seem to be tossing "nearly certain" around lightly. *so:mi < *so:-ma: is certainly not "nearly certain" in the sense of being the accepted option, nor in the sense of being problemless (no regular process based on this etymology explains the final *-i, and Finland Proper is not particularly swampy).

(Which is not to say that *ks.o:m sounds any better - but not really much worse either. This should yield **ho:mi. A relationship to IE *gh´mo: "man" is also a proposed possibility, but with even more assumptions required. I consider most likely the possibility of the word being cognate to the self-appellations "Sami", "Häme" (both < *Sämä < Baltic *Zeme: "land"), probably as an erly loan from Samic.)

John Vertical