Across Finnic and Samic, one of the more characteristic adjective endings is *-əta ~ *-ətä; yielding e.g. Finnish -ea ~ -eä, Estonian -e, Northern Sami -at. The Permic cognate *-i̮t is also at least relatively common. Because Of Reasons I…
Another word of previously notably unknown etymology recently has a new lead for it: Finnic *sana ‘word’, suggested by one Otso A. Bjartalíð (in a draft that was briefly posted on Academia.edu but seems to be currently down) to have…
I have been having a simmering discussion with commentator “M.” under the post on what’s important for what in historical Uralistics. One general topic there that I keep pushing hard back at is the idea of “etymology unknown” as anything…
Recently when tracking a variety of citations back into early literature, I was directed to Zsigmond Simonyi, 1901: “Az Ábel-féle szójegyzék” (Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 31: 225–227), an article reporting the corpus of a small Hungarian–Italian phrasebook from 1438. One point that…
In the last post I parenthetically mentioned a PU root “*täsə (UEW: *tisɜ)” ‘birch bark covering for a teepee’. This has been previously reconstructed from very scanty evidence: Komi /tis(k)a/, Forest Nenets /tʲēt/ ([tɕi͡et]), Kamassian [tʰɤʔ]. The latter two point…
The Proto-Finnic word for ‘birch bark’ was *toohi (consonant stem: *toohë-, partitive *tooh-ta), continued directly in Finnish and Karelian tuohi, Veps toh’. The southern Finnic languages mainly show derivatives: Votic toho, standard Estonian toht(u-), Võro tohk(o-), Livonian tū’oigõz (however EES…
A repeating complaint I run into with the more impressionistic reconstructions found in the UEW is the frequent use of *ŋ as a kind of a deus ex machina phoneme, reconstructed for all sorts of confusing correspondences of nasal consonants.…
In the UEW we find a rough Proto-Ugric reconstruction *pukkɜ ‘blunt end of a tool’, with divergent later semantic development: ‘eye of needle’ in Ob-Ugric, ‘back of hammer/ax/knife/…’ in Hungarian fok. There is reason to suspect though that if related,…
Freelance reconstruction 
Sami ruoŧŧa ‘Swedish’, ruošˈša ‘Russian’
The ethnonym and state name Russia(n) traces its origin back to older Rus’ (Русь). As the current standard etymology goes, this is thought to then derive, via the Varangian ruling class of pre-Slavic Russia, from Finnic *roocci ‘Sweden’, in derivatives…
Posted in Commentary, Etymology