--- In norse_course@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> 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.
This is quite interesting :) I've also heard of Finnish saku < *saku
and havukas < *habukaz (where the 'b' is actually a fricative).
I should list the ON equivalents of the words we've mentioned there:
*kuningaz = konungr
*xrengaz = hringr
(the 'x' letter used there represents a [x], not [ks])
*flauja = fley (I think)
*saku = sök
*habukaz = haukr
Of those, all three of the strong masculine words should be familiar
to you from our lessons.
Óskar