Linguistics illuminates the linguistically obscure – or so I’ve always thought. It’s a common theme of my online output that a little bit of historical linguistics goes a long way, making helpful connections and breaking down psychological barriers. This theme was present in two old posts of mine that used etymology to elucidate two Old English texts, namely Beowulf and The Wanderer. Now, as an unplanned third installment, allow me to show you how familiar a whole language can be. This is the infamously tricky Finnish language. There are more Finnish words that you, as an English speaker, can recognise than just sauna. Fiendish Finnish? To call Finnish “tricky” is only fair depending on your perspective. It has gained a reputation for difficulty through a general European point of view. Most of Europe today is a patchwork of spoken languages belonging to the Indo-European family, from English and Irish in the west, to Russian and Greek in the east. The few holes in this Indo-European blanket, like Hungarian and Basque, will not unreasonably seem very different in their vocabulary, grammar and sounds. Finnish is another such gap on the map; faced with Finnish numbers from 1 to 5 (yksi, kaksi, kolme, neljä, viisi), an English-speaking learner may go running back to the safety of Indo-European. Adopting the viewpoint of an English speaker for this post, Finnish does seem alien and arcane. People for whom it will not seem strange are of course the speakers of Finnish, and of languages within Finnish’s own family. Clustered around the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea, this family is called Finnic. Approximate spread of Finnic languages It contains roughly eleven members (counting languages is always hard). Two have achieved the hallowed status of national languages: Finnish and, over the water, Estonian. Karelian has official standing in the Republic of Karelia, part of the Russian Federation, but it and other Finnic languages in that country are severely endangered by Russian. Just as English does, Finnish has its own complex prehistory, stretching back millennia. Its immediate Finnic grouping is itself part of the dense family tree of Uralic. This diverse family includes other well-known languages, such as Hungarian and Sámi. Approximate spread of Uralic languages The family tree also includes many nexuses and ‘proto‘-nodes of con-/divergence. The Finnic languages, for example, go back to Proto-Finnic. This was their last common ancestor, which emerged in the second millennium BC. How exactly the Uralic puzzle should be pieced together continues to keep experts busy. The wide spread of Uralic across Eurasia, the late date of our earliest documents, and external influences from other languages make the Uralic family a much greater challenge than Indo-European. It remains tempting to speculate about a common origin of those two big language families (I’ve been tempted myself), but the signal from that distant speck in prehistory is so faint that the evidence could just be a handful of coincidences. For our purposes then, let us treat English and Finnish as fundamentally separate in their origins. Consequently, the lack of familiar faces in Finnish vocabulary makes the language very daunting. What then should the would-be learner do? Fear Finnish? Suffer or surrender? No! Linguistic history comes to the rescue. Finnic and Friends English and Finnish may be part of two entirely separate languages, but there are no hard borders on lexical allegiance. Indo-European languages have for thousands of years given vocabulary to Finnish or to its ancestral states; this is completely normal for any language. Recognising these donations can make Finnish feel much friendlier. Given the medieval and modern rulers of what is today Finland, we can expect the Finnish lexicon today to contain words of Swedish and Russian origin. These plentiful acquisitions can be useful for English speakers, especially those from Swedish, which is a fellow Germanic language. In this group, you may recognise in Finnish housut ‘trousers’, halli ‘hall’ and hytti ‘cabin’ the English words hose, hall and hut. Alongside Swedish, a language of socio-political prestige, Germanic languages of trade, like Low German, have also made contributions. Older Slavic speech, prior to what we think of as ‘Russian’, made their mark too. The Finnish city of Turku for example derives its name from an East Slavic word for ‘market’ (in Modern Russian: торг ~ torg). In waves of varying size, different languages have been washing up against Finnish/Finnic speakers and leaving vocabulary behind for centuries now – for millennia, even. This post henceforth concentrates on the earliest transferals, before the medieval era. Specifically, it looks at how the prehistoric ancestor of English influenced the prehistoric ancestor of Finnish. Through their early date of arrival, in the Bronze and Iron Ages, we can find these loanwords across the Finnic languages, not just in Finnish. Long before writing in any Finnic language slowly emerged (from the 13th century AD onwards), prehistoric Proto-Finnic had absorbed all sorts of words from languages in northern Europe. These include a couple of rare gems from some very ancient Indo-European language (see *lehti ‘leaf’). Many come from Proto-Baltic, and a great number from Proto-Germanic, the hypothetical ancestor of German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian and our own dear English. Birch bark letter no. 292, the oldest known document in any Finnic language Proto-Germanic is said to have had a very strong impact on the development of Proto-Finnic. Its signature can be seen in the number of words of ‘early Germanic’ origin in the vocabulary of a modern language like Finnish. Scholars have reckoned about 500 words, which is a sizable presence considering that Standard Finnish has around 6000 word stems. The intense lexical contact with Germanic speakers was so intense that it even affected the structure of syllables that Proto-Finnic could have. This has led scholars to describe Late Proto-Finnic, spoken and broken up in the first millennium AD, as “phonologically Germanicized” (Kallio 2012: 234). What then are those words? A few of them, simply through phonological chance, resemble their English cousins. It’s not hard to see how Finnish kattila ‘pot’ is related to kettle, or how naula and neula are both translated by and cognate with English nail and needle. Likewise, hamppu, haukka, kakku, leipä and valas still resemble hemp, hawk, cake, loaf and whale. Adjectives too were borrowed; ilkeä means ‘bad’ and is related to ill, just as raaka means and is related to raw. Even functional words were adopted from Proto-Germanic, which is a sign of profound linguistic influence. For example, Finnish sama and English same match in meaning and origin. Even that most quintessentially Finnish concept, the sauna, may have Germanic ancestry. It’s derived by some from a Proto-Germanic word that has given English stack. If true, this would be one of the many instances of Finnish/Finnic modifying new words’ sounds to fit its own strict phonological patterns. From Proto-Finnish onwards, the family has lacked the voiced consonants /b, d, g/, approximating them with voiceless /p, t, k/ instead. This swapping of sounds is how we etymologists can connect Finnish palje ‘bellows’ to bellows, or patja ‘mattress’ to bed. Finnic has also had a rule against more than one consonant at the beginning of a syllable. In the case of sauna, this rule meant that original *sta- became simply *sa-. Other Germanic borrowings ran up against this ban, and hence we get Finnish ruoho meaning and being related to English grass. Finnish kaunis ‘beautiful’ is cognate with English sheen and German schön. In this case, Proto-Germanic *skauni– would become Proto-Finnic *kaunis, losing the illegal *s. The selection of words given here as examples are just those I identified with recognisble connections to Modern English. If you bring in Old English or other Germanic languages, in particular the venerable Gothic, the Germanic legacy in Finnish comes to seem very great indeed. The author in Finland, c. December 2017, cold, poorly, but still rather charmed Germanic and Pre-Germanic Delving deeper still: the rich lode of Germanic is so substantial that linguists can talk about layers of loanwords, like geologically strata. By identifying the presence or absence of certain sound changes, we can pick out the different flavours of Germanic that Finnic has been in contact with. There is a recognisable footprint of Proto-Germanic, as opposed to later Germanic, to be seen. Famously, Finnic languages have been very conservative in some respects, preserving elements of borrowed Proto-Germanic words that were lost from the Germanic languages themselves. One possibly schema, with only a few members, of the Germanic family tree For example, the assembled evidence tells us that Proto-Germanic nouns could have the masculine singular ending *-az. It used this ending as part of its Indo-European inheritance; *-az was the Germanic counterpart to Latin -us and Ancient Greek -ος. The grammatical ending is no longer there at the end of English king, ring and lamb, but there it is, frozen like a fly in amber, at the end of Finnish kuningas, rengas and lammas. Finnic has also been finicky about vowels. It has maintained some that linguists have independently reconstructed for Proto-Germanic. For instance, the Modern English word oar goes back to Old English ār. We’d reconstruct it further back as *airō-, with the initial vowel *ai. The Finnish for oar? Well, it’s airo. We can piece together the Proto-Germanic skeleton from fragments strewn across its descendants, only to find the full fossil perfectly preserved in Finnish! Relatedly, English woe and one go back to their own ancestral words with *ai, which is there in Finnish vaiva ‘bother’ and ainoa ‘only’. Turning to the kitchen, the vegetable called leek in English and Lauch in German derives its name from Proto-Germanic *lauka-. Another in the allium genus, the onion, is laukka in Finnish. The word for ‘mattress’ above, patja, preserves the *j sound that English bed and German Bett must have once had, since it triggered the process of i-umlaut. Even more exciting for historical linguists is the idea that Finnish preserves words of ‘Pre-Germanic’ origin. That is to say, there are loanwords that preserved sounds at the time as yet unaffected by sound changes that would later define Proto-Germanic. One such change was the shift of *ā into *ō. The English words hoof, hen and seek go back to Proto-Germanic words with the vowel *ō. These were *hōfa-, *hanjō– and *sōkjan-. However, if we assume that these were previously *hāfa-, *hanjā– and *sākjan-, then it looks like it was from their earlier stage that Finnish gets kavio ‘hoof’, kana ‘chicken’ and hakea ‘to get’. Similarly, the E in rengas above is an example of an *e that shifted into *i in ‘classic’ Proto-Germanic and its descendants (hence, English ring). Plus, there’s the fact that Finnic seems to have taken Germanic words whose consonants consistently look Pre-Grimm. We Indo-Europeanists know that the initial *h in *hanjō– was previously a *k, and that old stop sound is what we find in Finnish kana. Granted, there are other explanations, but it is another potential pointer to relations with speakers of ‘Pre-Germanic’. All in all, Finnish and other Finnic languages show evidence of sustained contact with Germanic speakers. This has lasted from the Bronze-Age prehistory of a prehistoric language, right up until the incoming English loanwords of today. So, if I have a takeaway point, it’s that historical linguistics can break down the walls between languages! Treat Finnish as a product of a long history of human interaction, and it will start to seem much more manageable. You know more about other languages than you think. END. References Kallio, P. (2006). On the earliest Slavic loanwords in Finnic. Slavica Helsingiensia, 27, 154-166. Kallio, P. (2012). The prehistoric Germanic loanword strata in Finnic. A linguistic map of prehistoric Northern Europe, 225-238. Lehtinen, T., & Hakulinen, A. (2012). Finnish. Revue belge de Philologie et d’Histoire, 90(3), 1029-1052. Rajki, A. (2009) Finnish Etymological Dictionary. https://www.academia.edu/12788026/Finnish_Etymological_Dictionary Images personal or from Wikimedia Commons. Cover image: Neitokainen, an artificial pond in Finland, shaped like the country.