There are scores of old Germanic loans in
Finnish, many of them beautifully archaic and evidently dating back to a
chronological layer identifiable as Proto-Germanic, e.g. kuningas < *kuningaz
'prince', rengas < *xrengaz 'ring', laiva < *flauja- 'ship', etc. Finnish
is rather conservative in terms of phonological development, so those loans are
conserved like flies in amber, and their Finnish form is sometimes more archaic
than what you can find in any historically documented Germanic
language.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2001 7:24
PM
Subject: RE: [norse_course] Finnish
loans (was: synonyms)
E-Ching wrote:
>What clinches it for me is that the
Proto-Germanic tribes used
>to be neighbours of the Finns, long before
they split up to become
Saxons
>and Norse and Goths, etc., and the
Finns borrowed quite a few words
from
>Proto-Germanic at that
time. One of them is the stem _vark-_ 'thief'
>(_varas_ in the
nominative).
Hi there,
BTW it seems to be an interesting (though
off-topic) discussion.
Does someone know more Finnish loanwords?
I know
_jukko_ "yoke", but certainly I don't know the Norse word (since
Old Norse
dictionaries are hardly available here in Russia).
I might also have a go
and tyr to say that _Joulupukki_ (the Finnish
Santa Claus) is also two
loans:
_Joulu_ looks like jól (o with an accent mark, just in
case)
_pukki_ standalone means "goat" - certainly the cognate of the
English
"buck".
Any ideas?
Cut it if it's offtopic
;-)
Pavel