Santeri Junttila

Itämerensuomalaisissa kielissä on tunnetusti ainakin 200-300 kantasuomen aikaista lainasanaa balttilaisista kielistä. Myös balttilaisesta kielikunnasta on etsitty iältään vastaavia itämerensuomalaisia tai laajemmin uralilaisia lainoja. Artikkeli käsittelee kriittisesti esitettyjä 56 uralilaista lainaetymologiaa, jotka osoittautuvat riittämättömästi perustelluiksi. Vain liettuan šeškas, latvian sesks-sanaa on syytä tutkia edelleen mahdollisena uralilaisena lainana, mutta siltäkään ei puutu vaihtoehtoisia selityksiä.

The Finnic languages have an ancient loanword stock from Baltic, as proven already by Vilhelm Thomsen in 1869. Still, the period and location of the prehistoric contacts have not been satisfactorily established. A list of 202 old Baltic loanwords into Proto-Finnic has been presented by Seppo Suhonen in 1988. There are, however, 299 more Baltic etymologies suggested up to 1988 that Suhonen hasn't included in his list. This article aims to analyze whether some of these forgotten or abandoned etymologies might prove correct in the light of recent research in the field of historical lexicology. The analysis consists of three parts: distribution and alternative explanations; phonology; and semantics. 121 out of 282 analyzed etymologies failed the test. Most of the remaining 161 also seem problematic, but several of them will certainly be accepted after a thorough etymologic analysis in the future.

Dating and locating the ancient contacts between Baltic and Finnic is a crucial question when searching for the origins of the Finnic languages. Evidence gained from linguistic palaeontology seems to place Proto-Uralic in the Volga-Kama Basin, some 2000 kilometres east of the Baltic, in a region where the Uralic Mari and Udmurt languages are still spoken today (see Toivonen 1952 for a well-detailed study of the fi eld and Häkkinen 2009 for a somewhat revised view). However, there is no clear linguistic or archaeological evidence to tell us when Proto-Uralic broke down into its different daughter languages and when one of these, Proto-Finnic, had left this eastern area and spread to the shores of the Baltic Sea. In order to reconstruct the process and its different stages we require information that can be provided by the Baltic loanwords. As the Baltic loanwords are not attested in the more eastern Uralic branches, with the exception of a relatively few lexical items in Mordvinic (cf. van Pareren 2008 and Grünthal, this volume, for a recent detailed overview of the question), we must assume that the contacts took place when Finnic already was an independent branch within the Uralic language family or was at least in the process of breaking off. The contacts cannot be located far away from where the Baltic languages are or have been spoken. The area in which the Baltic languages were spoken was prehistorically much wider than it is today, since the major hydro-nyms of a vast area between Moscow and the mouth of the Vistula are of Baltic origin (Toporov – Trubačev 1962). The Volga-Kama Basin lies still too far east to be included in a list of possible contact locations. Instead, we could look for the contact area somewhere between Estonia in the west and the surroundings of Moscow in the east, a zone with evidence of Uralic settlement in the north and Baltic on the south side. Since present-day Finland lies quite far away from this zone, the discussion regarding the areal dimension of the contacts has concentrated on whether to include Finland in the contact area or not, and this question has chronological implications. There have been two main concurrent hypotheses concerning the assumed contacts in the territory of present-day Finland, fi rstly, the alleged migration of the Finnish settlement and, secondly, its continuity on the northern side of the Gulf of Finland. In addition, some other models have also been proposed. Here we shall discuss these theories and their strong and weak points.

The accumulation of information and tendencies in the study of loanwords: The research history of Baltic loans in Proto-Finnic

The old layer of vocabulary of Baltic origin in Finnic, or the Baltic loans in Proto-Finnic, was described by Vilhelm Thomsen in his monographs from 1869 and 1890. Altogether over one thousand Finnic words have been associated with this layer of loans in various sources. My research material consists of the etymologies correct or rejected posited for these words and the discussion thereof in printed sources between 1869 and 2009.
I define the concept of Baltic loan etymologies in Proto-Finnic via their hypernyms. The definition of an etymology draws borders with other etymologies of the same word and etymologies of other similar words. A loan etymology must consist of two parts, equation and claim of origin. The definition of these loans as Baltic distinguishes them from Pre-Baltic loans, while their definition as Proto-Finnic distinguishes them from later loans of Baltic origin.
The work includes an appendix consisting of a broad research-historical table in which the rows contain the posited origin of each word considered in the literature to be of Baltic origin. The columns consist of etymologies and the claims made to support them, grouped based on their argument types.
I categorize the posited origins based on the novelty and Baltic-ness of the etymologies they contain. The posited origins make up the reception history of each etymology: based on them, an etymology can be defined as generally accepted, questionable, generally rejected or unresearched at each moment of its reception history. The reception history of Baltic etymologies and their various alternative explanations demonstrates that loan explanations increased in popularity in the beginning of the period under consideration, decreased after the 1920s and have been on the increase once again since the 1970s. I list all Baltic loan etymologies in groups according to their conceptualization as of 2009.
The arguments used in loan etymologies are related to form, meaning, source language, distribution and the existence of layers of loans. By examining the historical development and usage context of each argument type, I bring to light very well founded research data and the accumulation thereof. The largest number of sustainable arguments has come from the Neogrammarian school of the 1890s and from structuralism beginning in the 1970s. By applying these paradigms, I identify dozens of generally accepted and questionable Baltic etymologies that should be rejected, as well as several rejected ones that should be accepted.