Indo-Iranian loanwords in Finnic - a critical overview

ENThe article deals with presumed Indo-Iranian loanwords in Finnic languages which have no cognates in other branches of the Uralic language family. A mainstream view, held by nearly all scholars of Uralic etymology, is that the contacts began already at the proto-language level, and that the words with a wide distribution in Uralic languages were borrowed from Proto-Indo-Iranian. Actually, contact is even attributed to before that, from “Pre-Indo-Iranian” which was still retaining the PIE vowel system, while some changes characteristic of Indo-Iranian had already happened in the consonantal system. The article discusses all the etymologies presented in earlier research and assesses their credibility (convincing/unconvincing/unclear). According to the author, the number of Indo-Iranian borrowings restricted to Finnic is in fact very low. In almost half of the cases evaluated in the paper, the words are either of non-Indo-Iranian origin or have cognates in other Uralic languages. If the unclear cases are counted, the number is even greater. Finnic words with a plausible Indo-Iranian etymology clearly refl ect several diachronic layers, all of which are shared by some other Uralic branches. This means that Finnic could not have acquired these words as a separate language. Some clearly late Iranian loans such as varsa and vasa have regular cognates in Mordvin [Koivulehto 1999a: 218–219], whereas some more archaic words are confi ned to Finnic. It is, however, interesting to note that many of the loanwords confi ned to Finnic manifest clearly Iranian features, and among those that are not demonstrably Iranian, there are no features that force us to consider these borrowings earlier Proto-Indo-Iranian loans; some of the more archaic loans are either problematic (such as verso) or should be rejected (such as herätä).There are few irregular cases (*waćara, *akštara, *šukta) which cannot be explained as wrong etymologies or results of undetected sound laws, though. They could either be parallel Indo-Iranian loans or indicate that the respective Indo-Iranian words spread through a dialect continuum which consisted of predecessors of Finnic, Saami and Mordvin, at the least. However, at least *waćara and *šukta clearly refl ect diff erent layers of Indo-Iranian borrowings (*waćara with *ć from PII *ȷ́ and *šukta with *š from PI *ts). It is therefore unlikely that they were simultaneously diff used through the already diff erentiated West-Uralic dialects. Keywords: Finnic languages, Uralic languages, Indo-Iranian languages, etymology, language contact.