Are there Proto-Slavic loanwords in Saami?

Abstract

Abstract

There are two nouns in Saami languages for which Proto-Slavic loan etymologies have been proposed: Proto-Saami *multtē ‘soap’ and *kuompe̮r ‘mushroom’, allegedly borrowed from Proto-Slavic *mỳdlo ‘soap’ and *gǫba ‘mushroom, fungus’. Both etymologies are critically analyzed, and in the process, new etymologies for several other Saami words are also proposed. It is suggested that the two Slavic loan etymologies are examples of the largely overlooked phenomenon of “chance correspondence”: although the matches between the Saami and the Slavic words are phonologically regular and semantically transparent, they nevertheless very probably result from sheer coincidence. The word *multtē ‘soap’ is showed to have an alternative and far more probable Proto-Norse loan etymology, and the Slavic etymology of the word *kuompe̮r turns out to be weak because it does not account for the stem-final consonant *r. This result entails a valuable methodological lesson: in addition to “chance similarities” between languages, there are also “chance correspondences” between them – that is, words that show a regular phonological and semantic match by pure coincidence. Although the latter are much rarer than the former, they nevertheless seem to be more common than is usually assumed. Because of this, far-reaching conclusions (such as assumptions of contact between two reconstructed proto-languages) should not be based on a mere couple of etymologies, no matter how plausible they may seem superficially.