2,650+ SIMILAR IRISH & FINNISH WORDS on Web Page

[DFOKeefe at aol.com]

Good Morning Anthony,
         Bjorn Collinder's book FENNO-UGRIC VOCABULARY (Stockholm: Almqvist &
Wiksell, 1955) helps to answer your question about IE words in Finnish. There
are about 502 Fenno-Ugric etymologies, 479 Uralic etymologies and (pp.
129-131) about 13 IE etymologies. In our judgmental selection of 2,650+
Finnish words, we saw numerous borrowings from the Scandinavian and Slavic
languages which were obvious, we didn't select them.  Still, even if a few
got through, it would have little effect on the validity of the overall
sample.
          I don't know about the statistical cutoff point where chance
resemblances between words of two languages turns into non-chance resemblance
between words of two languages. A priori, it must be well over 50%. In order
to eliminate the possibility of chance, we compared 502 Fenno-Ugric
etymologies and 479 Uralic etymologies (from Collinder's book) to IE roots
and found that most can be reasonably explained by IE roots. You may check
this out in our paper SIMILAR URALIC, FENNO-UGRIC AND INDO-EUROPEAN ROOTS at
our Web page (http://members.aol.com/IrishWord/page/index.htm in section 1.
(B.).). If most of these Fenno-Ugric and Uralic etymologies can be reasonably
explained by IE roots, then chance cannot be a factor. Hope this helps.

Thanks for your interest.
Best regards,
David O'Keefe
Houston, Texas