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…
With the assibilation *ti > *ci > si being one of the best-known innovations in Finnic, one would think it would have been researched to exhaustion long since. But there still seem to be new discoveries available. The best-known examples…
One minor phonological innovation in Finnish is mentioned in historical overviews far more often than could be expected from its lexical frequency: the loss of a palatal semivowel *j when preceding its vocalic counterpart *i. This is probably because the shift…
A theoretical device in historical linguistics that I think can easily go abused is the basic morphophonological concept of “alternation”. To lay some groundwork: an initial issue, on which I may expand more at some point, is that several grades…
Assigning meanings to Finnish derivational suffixes can be a pain. Plenty of them show a fairly scattershot selection of meanings. One example is -kko (-kkö); in modern Finnish, following Hakulinen in SKRK (54.15, 56.8 §§), six main functions can be…
Here is a somewhat speculative idea that recently occurred to me. I don’t think I will be able to deliberate on all the comparative implications just now, but it wouldn’t surprize me too much if something similar had already been…
Finnish armas ‘dear’ has a somewhat interesting etymology: the word is considered to derive by borrowing followed by semantic amelioration from Germanic *armaz ‘pitiful’. If we were given no other data, this argument would have to remain rather hypothetical. The shape…
I brought up Similar Place Avoidance (SPA) a couple of posts ago. Here is a neat case study of it in action, one that I have already noted quite some time ago. An Introduction The Finnic languages are usually considered…
Freelance reconstruction 