(174)Hyllested - Finn loan Germ.pdf

Balto-Fennic Loanwords
in Early North Germanic 70
ADAM HYLLESTED
University of Copenhagen
1 Early Scandinavian-Fennic Contacts
In recent years, archaeologists and runologists have made remarkable
discoveries about the early activities of Eastern Scandinavians on their
trade routes to the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea. In the Merovingian
period (500-800 AD, the time preceding the Viking Age), these routes
cut through vast areas with Fennic-speaking populations, and Poussa
(2004) has put forward the hypothesis that the reduction of phoneme
symbols in the Younger Futhark from 24 to 16 was due to external influence
by an early Balto-Fennic language, seeing that the reduced Runic
consonant inventory resemble those of the Balto-Fennic languages.
In an area characterized by lively trade and intensive contact between
the speakers of two divergent linguistic groups, we would expect
to find a lot of obviously borrowed lexical material. However, only a
single article on Balto-Fennic loanwords in North Germanic has been
published recently (Hofstra 1997) and hasn’t added more than a single
word to the already scarce material, namely ON jalda ‘mare’ from a hypothetical
PBF *ältä, gen. *älδän, corresponding to Mordvin äld’ä (Hofstra
1997: 129)
Bergsland (1965) demonstrated that the Nordic name of the ‘fox’, ON
refr, having cognates as far away as in Ibero-Romance, must be a
70 This short sketch is based on a lecture (“Balto-Fennic Influence on Early North
Germanic”) given at the interdisciplinary symposium The Futhark and the Fur
Trade at the University of Umeå, September 2005. A more thorough version will
be printed in Patricia Poussa and Per Ambrosiani (eds.): The Futhark and the
Fur Trade: Language Contact in the Pre-Viking Period (Umeå: Kungliga Skytteanska
Samfunnets Handlingar).

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ADAM HYLLESTED
Scythian/Alanian loanword in Balto-Fennic (e.g. Fi. repo; see also Brøndal
1928, Hofstra 1997: 129) from where it was borrowed into Nordic.
The rest is ON sylgja ‘brooch’ < PBF *solki ‘buckle’ (de Vries 1962,
Hofstra 1997 : 130-132), ON peyta ‘fur’, cf. Fi. paita (de Vries 1962,
Hofstra 1997 : 127-128), ON sóta ‘war’, cf. Fi. sota (de Vries 1962, Hofstra
1997 : 128), seið ‘witchcraft’, cf. Fi. seita (Parpola 2004).
1 New etymologies
1.1 OLD NORSE ‘WILLOW’ PÍLL
ON píll m. ‘willow’ (earlier also ‘poplar’) is usually interpreted as a derivation
of píla f. ‘arrow’, either referring to the shape of the leaves or to
the use of willow wood for bow-making.
There are good reasons to dismiss this etymology. First of all, willow
wood is in fact not very apit for producing bows or arrows. Second, A
popular designation for the rowan in German is Pielbeerbaum (not
†Pfeilbeerbaum), officially called Vogelbeerbaum, Eberesche, whose initial
non-affricated p- shows that it must be borrowed from Nordic or
Low German. Finally, the very fact that there are several explanations of
how the tree got its name is suggestive of a folk etymology.
I propose the following alternative etymology: ON píll goes back to
Early North Germanic *pihlar, a loanword from Balto-Fennic *pihla-
‘rowan’, cf. Est. pihl, pihlakas, Fi. pihlaja, pihlava. It cannot a be a loanword
in the reverse direction since the Balto-Fennic word has a wellestablished
Fenno-Ugric etymology, going back to PFU *pićla ‘id.’
(UEW 729, Campbell 1990: 168), and there are numerous cognates in
other Fenno-Ugric languages: Cheremis (Mari) pizle, Votyak (Udmurt)
paleź, Vogul (Mansi) paśar. Another PFU root which is probably ultimately
related *pećɛ (without the suffix -la) has the meaning ‘willow’ (>
Hung. füz, Zyrian/Komi paća ‘id.’ and Votyak puč’i ‘bud, willow chadkin’;
UEW 367).
Extralinguistic facts about these trees provide a clear motivation for
borrowing: the rowan was believed to possess a magic force and is thus
a typical culture-word. Rowan wood is quite suitable for engraving
signs, which might have paved the way for its religious importance. Willow
leaves and and rowan leaves are of quite similar shape, and they
both have a greyish underneath. The name might have been specifically
applied to the rowan species Sorbus intermedia whose generic name

Balto-Fennic Loanwords in Early North Germanic 63
indicates the similarity with willows just like the Danish name seljerøn
(lit. ‘willow rowan’).
1.2 OLD NORSE HARKI ‘(FISH) RAKE’
According to the standard handbooks (e.g. de Vries 1962), ON harki
‘(fish) rake’ is cognate of harka ‘clatter; hark’ and skrapa ‘scrape,
scratch’, ultimately derived from PIE *(s)ker- ‘cut etc.’.
MLG harke is borrowed from Nordic, which makes the word exclusively
North Germanic. The extremely specialized shared with Proto-
Balto-Fennic *harkka or *haraka (Fi. harkki, Est. haro < *haraγ-) ‘(fish)
rake, harrow’ makes it very likely that the Germanic word is borrowed
Balto-Fennic and has nothing to do with the PIE root for ‘to cut’. It
cannot be a borrowing the other way round since the Balto-Fennic word
is known to be derived regularly < FU *šara-ka, a derivative of the same
root *šara as the next item. As a tool term, it constitutes a typical loanword.
1.3 OLD NORSE HERFI ‘HARROW’
ON herfi ‘harrow’ (< pre-umlaut *harfi), traditionally accepted as a
cognate of harvest (< PGerm. *harbista-), likewise from IE *(s)ker- ‘cut
etc.’.
Middle English harewe is borrowed from Nordic, which makes this
word exclusively North Germanic as well, whereas its alleged cognate
‘harvest’ is widespread in West Germanic. Striking formal and semantic
similarity with the Balto-Fennic word which is known to be old and
cannot have been borrowed from Nordic.
Again, striking formal and semantic similarity between this word
and Proto-Balto-Fennic *harava ‘harrow’ (< Fenno-Ugric *šara-pa), a
derivative of the same root *šara as the previous item, renders a Balto-
Fennic origin more than probable. Again, the word designates a specialized
tool. Due to the vocalism in herfi, the borrowing must have
taken place before the rise of the Nordic i-umlaut. Like in the case of
píll, this speaks for the Merovingian period 500-800 B.C.

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ADAM HYLLESTED
1.3 OLD NORSE HAMARR ‘HAMMER; STONE’ AND GERMANIC
COGNATES
ON hamarr ‘hammer; stone’, even though it is a common Germanic lexeme,
will also be treated here because of its obvious semantic and formal
similarities to harki and herfi. It is generally supposed to be related
to Slavic kamy ‘stone’ and by some scholars even to himinn ‘heaven’ (<
‘vault’), cf. that both meanings are covered by related words in Sanskrit
and Iranian.
Fi. hamara ‘back of an axe’ is usually regarded as a borrowing from
Germanic ; the h- in this word, however, regularly goes back to PFU *š-
as in harkki and harava: the Fenno-Volgaic proto-form is *šama-ra, cf.
North Saami šibmar ‘pole of axe’, Lule Saami sjimēr ‘back of a hammer’
Skolt Saami šammer ‘hatchet’, Mordvin čov, šov ‘back of a knife’ (UEW
782-783). Unless we are dealing with a remarkable coincidence, it seems
that the Germanic word for ‘hammer’ is not at all Indo-European, but in
fact borrowed from Fennic. It thus seems that terms for tools have been
borrowed from Balto-Fennic languages not only into the Merovingian
period, but even earlier, at least in a common West Germanic period.
Theoretically, it is possible that the Germanic tool term has been
contaminated with the very similar Fenno-Ugric one, so that we are in
fact dealing with a word of multiple origins. It is important to note,
though, that the IE item is somewhat irregular and that the Germanic
word is semantically closer to the Fenno-Ugric one than to its alleged IE
cognates.
References
Bergsland, Knut, 1965: “Finno-Scandinavian rebas ‘fox’”. – Norsk Tidsskrift for
Språkvitenskap 20: 243-248.
Brøndal, Viggo, 1928: “Mots “scythes” en nordique primitif”. – Acta Philologica
Scandinavica 3: 1-31.
Campbell, Lyle, 1990: “Indo-European and Uralic Tree Names”. – Diachronica 7:
149-180.
Hofstra, Tette, 1997: “Zu mutmaßlichen frühen ostseefinnischen Lehnwörtern im
Nordgermanischen”. – S.-L. Hahmo, T. Hofstra, L. Honti, P. van Linde & O.
Nikkilä (eds.): Finnisch-ugrische Sprachen in Kontakt. Maastricht: 127-134.
Jansson, Ingmar, 2003: “Kulturkontakter och kontinuitetsbroot i Östersjöområdet -
ur en arkeologs perspektiv”. – Staffan Nyström (red.) Namn och kulturella kontakter
i Östersjöområdet [= Norna-rapporter 78]. Uppsala: Norna-Förlaget. 11-
59.

Balto-Fennic Loanwords in Early North Germanic 65
Parpola, Asko, 2004: “Old Norse seiðr, Finnish seita and Saami shamanism”. – I.
Hyvärinen, P. Kallio, and J. Korhonen (eds.), Etymologie, Entlehnungen und
Entwicklungen: Festschrift für Jorma Koivulehto zum 70. Geburtstag [=
Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki 63]. Helsinki. 235-273.
Poussa, Patricia, 2004 : “The futhark and the fur trade : on the adaptation of an
alphabet by its users”. – Fred Karlsson (ed.) : Proceedings of the 20th
Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics [= University of Helsinki, Department of
Linguistics, Publications no. 36].
UEW = Károly Rédei 1988: Uralisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch I-III. Budapest :
Akadémiai Kiadó.
de Vries, Jan, 1962: Altnordisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch. Leiden: Brill.