Päivitetty 27.4.2004  –  Palautteet

Virittäjä-lehti  >  Hakemistot  >  Kirjoitukset ja tiivistelmät: 1/2004 (108)

The origin of the Finnic stem *leütä

The Finnish verb löytää ‘to find’ most probably originates from Proto-
Finnic, with *leütä- as its reconstructed Late Proto-Finnic stem. No indisputable explanation of how the verb came to appear in Proto-Finnic has so far been presented, however. The traditional explanation is that there was an original Finno-Ugrian stem *lewdä-, which was later preserved only in the Hungarian verb lel and in the Finnic language family. It has since been claimed that such a distribution would be contrary to expectations and that such a consonant sequence (*-wd-) in the reconstructed stem would be unique and thus inconsistent with Uralic phonotactics. In the light of our knowledge today, however, these counter-arguments cannot be considered valid.

There is a competing view suggesting that the stem is a regular Proto-Finnic derivative form: *lew-tA-. If this is the case, the verb would originally have been related to the Finnish verb lyödä ‘to hit, beat’, which originates from a Finno-Ugrian stem meaning ‘to throw’ or ‘to hit’.

The writer questions both views suggested so far and proposes a new alternative, namely that *leütä- is a borrowing from the Proto-German verb *cleutan, represented by, for example, the Icelandic verb hljóta ‘to be granted, have allotted to oneself, undergo’. Phonetic characteristics indicate that the borrowing would have occurred at a very early stage, which is also supported by the word’s distribution throughout Finnic.

The final part of the article demonstrates that the borrowing could even have a Pre-Germanic origin. Late representatives of the same Indo-European root also occur in the Baltic languages.
There is a slim possibility that the Hungarian verb mentioned is also derived from the same early original. While such borrowing may be possible theoretically, from the point of view of historical phonology, serious questions arise with regard to geographical contact areas and semantics. Testing this idea would, in any event, require a separate study.

Johan Schalin