LL-L "Language contacts" 2003.10.14 (02) [E]

Tue Oct 14 17:10:26 UTC 2003

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language contacts

Dear Lowlanders,

Robert Thiel forwarded to me further information about Germanic loans in
Finnic provided by a mutual acquaintance: Tapani Salminen, a specialist in
Finnic.  Please find it below.   Kiitos, Tapani, and thanks, Bob!

For your reference, I am repositing some crucial information before Tapani's
(and yes, it ought to be _kansanlaulu_, not *_kansalaulu_).

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

***

I wrote:

> Apparently, Finnish _kansa_ 'folk', 'people' was derived from an Old
> Germanic version of the word (> _kansakunta_ 'nation', _kansallisuus_
> 'nationatity', _kansalaulu_ 'folksong', _kansatanssi_ 'folkdance', etc.).

I have been wondering about the _k-_ here.  Finnish does have _h-_, thus you
would expect *_hansa_.  The question is if the Old Germanic word had a
pronunciation like *_xansa_, or if this is due to a Finnish-internal shift,
and Old Finnish did not have _h-_, thus something like _hansa_ >>
_hansa_/_xansa_ > _kansa_.  The next question would be what the origin of
Finnish _h-_ is.

Something like this appears to have happened indeed.  Consider (assumedly
earlier) Germanic _hana_ > Finnish _kana_ 'hen' (cf. German _Hahn_, LS
_haan_, Danish _hane_, Swedish _hane_ 'rooster', German _Henne_, LS _heen_,
Danish _høne_, Swedish _hona_, _höna_ 'hen') vs. (assumedly later) Germanic
*_hana_ > Finnish _hana_ 'tap', 'faucet', 'spigot' (cf. German _Hahn_, LS
_haan_, Danish _hane_ 'tap', 'faucet', 'spigot').

***
Antero wrote:

>>Apparently, Finnish _kansa_ 'folk', 'people' was derived from an Old
>>Germanic version of the word (> _kansakunta_ 'nation', _kansallisuus_
>>'nationatity', _kansalaulu_ 'folksong', _kansatanssi_ 'folkdance', etc.).
>
>I have been wondering about the _k-_ here.   Germanic
>*_hana_ > Finnish _hana_ 'tap', 'faucet', 'spigot' (cf. German _Hahn_, LS
>_haan_, Danish _hane_ 'tap', 'faucet', 'spigot').
>
>Unfortunately, I can't find a comparative Finnic, Finno-Ugric or Uralic
>index online that could shed light on this.
>
>Any ideas?

A very very hasty answer: Firstly it's _kansanlaulu_ (folk's song) not
kansalaulu etc. but yes _kansakunta._ Secondly, the _hana > kana_
transformation might be due to the Russian influence, compare
Hitler>Gitler and _galanda_ = Dutch. Later.

***

I responded to Antero's:

You wrote above:

> Firstly it's _kansanlaulu_ (folk's song) not
> kansalaulu etc. but yes _kansakunta._

Thanks.  So it's a genitive construction for the first and not for the
second.

> Secondly, the _hana > kana_
> transformation might be due to the Russian influence, compare
> Hitler>Gitler and _galanda_ = Dutch. Later.

I'm not sure if I will buy this one.  It's supposed to be a very old loan.
Also, Russian would have had to borrow the word first (> *_ган(а)_
[*gan(a)]) and then pass it on to Finnish (> _kana_).  I don't think there
is any evidence of that.

Se on pulmallinen asia ...  ;)

***
I added:

Note also the supposedly Germanic-derived Finnish and Estonian word for
'fish': _kala_.  This is supposed to have been derived from the Germanic
word for 'whale', thus originally probably something like "large fish" or
"ocean creature" for the Finnic ancestors who had arrived from the Volga
region at the shores/beaches (_strand_ >) _ranta_ of the Baltic _meri_ (cf.
Old German _meri_, Old Saxon _mēri_, Old Norse _marr_ < Germanic *_marī_):

Old English: hwæl
Old Norse: hvalr (/hval+r/)
*Germanic: *xwalis (*/xwal+is/)

Cf. (Baltic) Old Prussian: kalis 'sheath fish'

***
From: Tapani Salminen
Date: Monday, October 13, 2003 10:02:02 PM
To: Robert Thiel
Cc: antero.helasvuo at welho.com
Subject: Re: Fw: LL-L "Etymology" 2003.10.13 (09) [E]

Dear Bob, hyvä Antero,

If you want, you can forward my reply to the list. Please ask list members
to send copies of their replies directly to me as I'm not a subscriber.

> >Hai everyone
> >Ron replied to Antero: Secondly, the _hana > kana_ transformation might
> >be due to the Russian influence,

I haven't read that message, but see below.

> >But, if I remember correctly from a book I read as a child, wasn't
> >Karelie/Finland
> >at one time under Russian rule? Could that have been sufficient to
> >influence some words and alter their pronunciation?

As far as I know, no phonological changes in Finnish has been attributed
to Russian influence. Again, see below.

> I don't know when the poultry was introduced to Finland, in any
> case it was a rare phenomenon till the end of the 16. century. The name
> "kana" obviously is of Germanic origin: Swedish "höna" and as Ron
> pointed out the Low Saxon "hana".

"kana" is, indeed, of Germanic origin; in fact, it was borrowed into
Proto-Finnic from Proto-Germanic, long before the emergenge of modern
languages such as Swedish, Low Saxon, Russian or Finnish.

> As for my speculation that the
> transformation from h to k might be due to Russian influence, well Ron
> said: "Russian would have had to borrow the word first (> *_???(?)_
> [*gan(a)]) and then pass it on to Finnish (> _kana_)", which is very
> good argument.

This is far-fetched speculation, to put it mildly. What we have here is a
well-established sound substitution: since Proto-Finnic lacked a voiceless
velar fricative consonant /x/ (and the laryngeal /h/ only developed in
Proto-Finnic), the Proto-Germanic sound was regularly substituted with its
closest equivalent, the voiceless velar stop /k/.

> However all kinds of changes can take place in
> circumstances where many languages meet, so purely speculatively I think
> a place like Wyborg could have been a breeding ground for
> transformations like hana>kana and hansa>kansa.

At the time of the borrowing, Proto-Slavonic, the ancestor of Russian, was
spoken far away from Finnic-speaking areas. Also, developments as recent
as a few hundred years would have been widely attested and documented.

> It's also only a short while ago when the colloquial
> Finnish was strongly divided in dialects actively used by the "common
> people" Those dialects have phonems, often antiquated ones, the
> relatively young standard literary language does not know.

I can only think of a couple of phonemes known to some dialects but absent
in standard Finnish. The statement also seems to imply that Finnish
dialects have recently lost much of their distinctivity, which is perhaps
not quite true, and nobody has certainly shifted to speaking standard
Finnish. I'm not sure how this is connected to the above discussion, but
in terms of phonology, the traditional dialects of Wyborg area show no
unusual characteristics.

WIth best regards, Tapani

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