basic vocabulary borrowing (was: IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics)

[Adam Hyllested]

On Wed, 9 Feb 2000, Ante Aikio wrote:

> Well, I actually forgot about 'ten'. The Hungarian word is also an Iranian
> loan. Concerning the affix *-teksä(n), this explanation has been
> recently revived: it has been argued that it is a loan from Proto-Iranian
> *detsa. The phonetics are flawless; there are other examples of U *ks <
> Iranian *ts (The cluster *ts was illegal in U, hence the substitution).
> This explanation seems more plausible to me at least than the previous
> rather fabricated theory that Finnish kahdeksan and yhdeksän developed
> from *kakta e-k-sä-n 'two do not exist' (i.e., "two are missing from
> ten") and *ükti e-k-sä-n.

Well, what speaks  in favour of the latter theory is of course the fact
that '10' in Finnish is not **teksa:n, but <kymmenta:/kymmenen>, a word
that also exists in Mordvin, Yukaghir, and Omok. Furthermore, it
resembles full grade of a root cognate to the IE *kmt- 'hand' (with the
derivations *dekmt '10' and *(d)kmtom '100'); the zero grade shows up in U
*ka:te 'hand', Finnish <ka:si>. Whether a loanword, a cognate, or a word
of totally different origin, kymmenta: '10' must be older than '8' and
'9', if these are borrowed from Iranian.
By the way, on the basis of what material you are reconstructing a
Proto-Iranian *detsa ?. PIE *dekmt became *das'a already in
Indo-Iranian; compare Sanskrit <das'a> '10' and Avestan <dasa> '10'.

Best Regards,

Adam Hyllested
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Student of Indo-European, Uralic and Balkan linguistics
Institute for General and Applied Linguistics
University of Copenhagen
adahyl at cphling.dk
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Editor of etymologies and language surveys
Danish National Encyclopedia
dnhy at gyldendal.dk