FS *pus^tas 'pure'                            PIE *puh2-to-s

 

Koivulehto's etymologies are very ingenious. Whatever you think of them, you can't say they are based on superficial similarities. Some look rather far-fetched or so contrived that one's tempted to classify them as too clever by half (Koivulehto is too careful to offer patently false equations but is not averse to speculative ones). Others, including most of the above-quoted examples, look pretty convincing. There seems to be a falling gradient of attestation from west to east, with a particularly high number of FS reflexes and a low number of Samoyedic ones (hence so few U forms). The last group of examples shows how whole word-families were absorbed, with traces of IE derivational morphology preserved in Uralic.

 

If there are genuine U/IE cognates, one should look for them outside this set. There are such well-known candidates as U *weti 'water' and U *nimi 'name', where the apparent _absence_ of characteristically IE morphological extensions might be taken to favour inheritance over borrowing (no Proto-Indo-Uralic derivational morphology has been reconstructed yet). Others, like FP (U?) *kälV(-wV) 'sister-in-law', FU *meti 'honey', or FU *pata 'cauldron, pot', look attractive but may easily represent ancient loans, especially in view of the fact that such items are found mainly in the western part of Uralic (FU or its subbranches). The "mead" and "pot" words, especially, are notorious wanderers.

 

Much is being done in this area, especially by Finnish scholars, but unfortunately much of the relevant literature is in Finnish (and therefore inaccessible to most IEists), and many exciting new findings take a long time from being mentioned in personal communication (seminars, coffee-time conversation at linguistic conferences) to getting published.

 

Piotr