A recent blog post from Christopher Culver brings to my attention an apparent family of Turkic word roots showing irregular variation in form: *künäš ~ *qujaš ‘sun, day, heat’. Aside from the alternation *n ~ *j (for which *ń seems…
For later reference, here’s a collection of etymologically opaque (to me) Eastern Votic words harvested from my new dictionary. I will not attempt any detailed analysis yet. (Presumably some investigation into Russian, Ingrian, Estonian, maybe even Latvian & German could…
A project I am working on and off is compiling lexical parallels that have been proposed in connection to various proposed external relationships of Uralic. Occasionally this kind of work turns up nice new etymological insights. One of the best-retained…
Shifting and widening my scope a little, here’s a look into the history of two consonant clusters across the Samic languages as a whole. The two-glide cluster *-jv- is a simple place to start. The development of this is straightforward:…
My recent etymological proposals in the previous post have turned out to not be news after all. Petri Kallio has informed me that essentially identical etymologies for the Finnic words for “aspen” and “horse”, ie. based on a metathesis of…
Here’s to resume the topic of sibilant+stop clusters in loanwords into Finnic, previously treated in “Extending a substitution pattern”. This time I’m focusing on clusters involving the bilabial stop /p/. For some reason, clusters of the type /Sp/ were originally…
In relatively new loans into Finnish (for the last 1500 years, at least; AFAIK similarly in most other Uralic languages), *s+stop clusters are uniformly retained medially (piispa “bishop”, masto “mast”, viski “whisk(e)y”) and simplified to the stop initially (piikki “spike”,…
Several bits of additional evidence in favor of (or, if you will, additional bits of data explainable by) Aikio’s new model of the Proto-Uralic root type *a-ə seem to be found in word derivation. 1. In the appendix of his…
Freelance reconstruction 