LIETUVIŲ KALBOTYROS KLAUSIMAI, VI

LIETUVOS TSR MOKSLŲ AKADEMIJA

FINNISH SII

E. NIEMINEN

As this volume of “Questions of Lithuanian Linguistics” was being prepared for publication, the sad news arrived that on May 24, 1962, the renowned specialist in comparative historical linguistics and researcher of the relations between the Baltic and Slavic languages and the Finnish languages, Prof. E. Nieminen, had died in Helsinki. The death of this distinguished linguist is a great loss to Baltic philology and Lithuanian studies, to which he made a substantial contribution. Prof. E. Nieminen’s article “Finnisch sii,” received from the author on April 16, 1962, is probably his last work on words of Baltic origin borrowed into Finnish.

In this essay I examine somewhat more thoroughly a Finnish noun expressing a concept that is of no little cultural-historical interest. The word I have in mind is Finnish sii, “a wall beam supporting the roof structure and projecting beyond the wall surface of the house.” Since sii has no etymological connections with the rest of the language material, it could readily have happened at an early date that an effort arose to make this word more intelligible to speakers. This is achieved by an explanatory compound. The compound sii-hirsi¹ has been formed, in which, viewed purely logically, both parts of the compound say almost the same thing; for hirsi generally means “beam”². Elsewhere, the dialects also use puu “wood” as the second element (sii-puu³). Judging from all the evidence, sii is an old designation that has always belonged to the terminology of house construction. Finnish sii is explained, among others, by Toivonen⁴ and Itkonen⁵ as an inherited Finno-Ugric word, which they associate with the following word family: Zyryan śig-er

¹ Various siihirsi types are illustrated in Valonen, Satakunta, XV, p. 123.

² sii or sii-hirsi “tignus medius tectum interius supportans, large beam beneath the inner roof,” Renvall, Lexicon linguae finnicae (Aboae, 1826), II, p. 170; sii-hirsi “the uppermost beam supporting the roof’s substructure and projecting beyond the plane of the wall,” Vuorela, Kansatieteen sanasto (Helsinki, 1958), p. 95.

³ S. Valonen, Satakunta, XV, p. 124.

⁴ Virittäjä XXV (Helsinki, 1922), S. 20 f.

⁵ Finnisch-ugrische Forschungen, XXX, (Helsinki, 1949), S. 48, Ural-Altaische Jahrbücher, XXVIII, (Wiesbaden, 1956), S. 66. Hier wird für sii als Bedeutung „Dachbalken“ angegeben.

12. Kalbotyros klausimai VI.

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“Roof frame; roof ridge; vault,” Votyak śig “attic; room in the upper part of the house; vault, peak,” Ostyak śij “bend of a runner (from the ground up to the front part of the sled)”⁶. As for Finnish sii, according to Itkonen⁷, a proto-form *sije < *śiŋe must be posited for Proto-Finnic. The sound sequence -ije- is said originally to have shifted to -iji-, from which -ī- then arose through contraction. According to Toivonen, the meanings of the Finno-Ugric words under discussion very probably point to a basic meaning “vault” or the like. In my view, the association of Finnish sii with the compared Finno-Ugric words is too uncertain for anything to be built upon it. The meaning of sii seems so far removed from the meanings of the cited Finno-Ugric nouns that it is preferable to assume that we are dealing here with different, unrelated words.

According to Valonen⁸, it is possible that Finnish sii contains the Swedish noun sida “side,” in the compound form side-. Compare Swedish Side-by>Finnish Sii-pyy. This is the name of a parish situated on the coast of the Gulf of Bothnia in western Finland. In the genuinely Finnish compound side hirsi “the middle beam of the ceiling,” the first element (side “joint”) has, after the loss of -d-, produced dialectal sii- not sie- (sie-hirsi). Since the simplex sii is undoubtedly older than the compound sii-hirsi, the explanation of sii as a loanword from Swedish sida, side- is unconvincing.

As stated, Finnish sii, which is used only for a particular kind of beam, does not fit semantically with the Finno-Ugric word family cited above. It should be emphasized that the Finno-Ugric nouns in question are not used to designate long timbers, poles, or the like. By contrast, the correspondence with a Lithuanian-Latvian noun is striking not only phonetically but also conceptually. The words I have in mind are Lithuanian sijà “connecting or bridge beam; beam, crossbeam, stringer, cap beam, deck or roof beam” and Latvian sijà “foundation or longitudinal beam, crossbeam beneath a bridge or floor. Deck or roof beam.” The Lithuanian word sijà is used, among others, by the famous Samogitian writer Simonas Daukantas (1793—1864) in the sense “a thick, long beam intended to join parts of a bridge or a house”⁹. It must be admitted that the Baltic nouns in question and sii are very similar in sound. All this makes any attempt to demonstrate that the Finnish word is native even etymologically questionable. It is entirely reasonable to ask whether Finnish sii, which occurs in the compounds sii-hirsi and sii-puu, may stand in some kind of loan relationship

⁶ Vgl. auch Collinder, Fenno-Ugric Vocabulary (Uppsala, 1955), S. 56; Joki, Finnisch-ugrische Forschungen, XXXII, Anz. (1956), S. 49.

⁷ Finno-Ugric Studies, XXX, pp. 40, 48.

⁸ Satakunta, XV, p. 129.

⁹ S. Daukantas, Rinktiniai raštai (Kaunas, 1955), S. 462.

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which stands alongside Lithuanian sijà and Latvian sija. Despite the restriction of sii to western Finnish dialects¹⁰, I believe one should not doubt the word’s Proto-Baltic-Finnic antiquity. There is ample evidence elsewhere, too, of an original word surviving into modern times only in a small part of the language area. For example, I draw attention here to New Bulgarian бърна ‘lip’, which has no counterpart in the other Slavic languages. The word is by no means a recent formation, but an ancient word inherited from the pre-Slavic period, as shown by its exact Lithuanian counterpart burnà ‘mouth’¹¹. As regards accentuation, according to Būga it is būrnà in Samogitian¹². The Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language, published by the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences¹³, records būrnà from the Kretinga district. The meanings of the Bulgarian noun and burnà are, of course, not incompatible. Regarding the differences in meaning between these words, I refer, among others, to Russian уста ‘mouth; lips’; Russian рот ‘mouth’, Czech ret ‘lip’ (< Proto-Slavic *гъть).

According to the generally accepted view, the Baltic terms for ‘beam’ cited above are descendants of the Indo-European root sei- ‘bind’, to which, among others, Lithuanian siēti ‘tie, fasten; bind, connect, join’ and Latvian siet ‘bind, tie’ belong¹⁴. Accordingly, the original meaning of sijà must be taken to have been ‘connecting beam’. Judging from its etymology, the long timber that originally bore this name was a beam intended to connect the opposite walls of a house, parts of the roof structure, and so forth. The aforementioned Baltic nouns are still used today to designate various beams of this kind¹⁵. The parts of the roof structure for which Lithuanian sijà is used are ‘roof purlin’, ‘intermediate purlin’, and ‘ridge purlin’¹⁶.

¹⁰ Valonen’s map sketch, loc. cit., p. 126, gives an overview of the sii localities in Finland.

¹¹ S. Mladenov, Indogermanische Forschungen, XXXV (Strassburg, 1915), S. 134, Етимологически и правописенъ речникъ на българския книжовенъ езикъ (София, 1941), S. 54.

¹² S. Būga, Tauta ir žodis, I (Kaunas, 1923), S. 406.

¹³ Lietuvių kalbos žodynas, I (Vilnius, 1941), S. 975.

¹⁴ S. u. a. Skardžius, Lietuvių kalbos žodžių daryba (Vilnius, 1943), SS. 41, 48; Pokorny, Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, I (Bern-München, 1950), S. 891 f.

¹⁵ S. u. a. Bielenstein, Die Holzbauten und Holzgeräte der Letten (Petrograd, 1918), SS. 16, 25 ff., 86, 716, 777. Einen sijà genannten Querbalken, auf dem die Decke eines Zimmers ruht, zeigt auch die Abbildung, die man bei Straubergs, Latviešu tautas mīklas, sakāmvārdi un parunas (Kopenhagen, 1956), S. 31, findet.

¹⁶ S. Gimbutas, The Roof of the 19th-Century Lithuanian Farmhouse (Stuttgart, 1948), p. 95.

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The answer to several Latvian folk riddles is sija, the tie beam¹⁷. One of the riddles cited reads: Vidus istabā, abi gali ārā, that is, ‘the middle part is inside the room, both ends are outside’. It refers to the two ends of the tie beam, which extend a little beyond the house walls. To give a proper idea of the notions associated with the term sija, it is worth citing a few more riddles whose answer is the aforementioned word: Gaspāza iekšā, kājas ārā, that is, ‘the mistress of the house is inside, her feet are outside’; Paits iekšā, galva ārā, that is, ‘the body is inside, the head is outside’; Mārga istabā, bize ārā, that is, ‘the girl is in the room, her braid is outside’; Guovs kūtī, ragi laukā, that is, ‘the cow is in the cowshed, its horns are outside’.

However, a Baltic sija can hardly be considered the original of sii; for the Finnic peoples would probably have adopted such an ā-feminine into their language as *sija, a sound form in which the word would have remained unchanged in Finnish down to the present day. It should be emphasized, namely, that disyllabic forms of the type *sija were not foreign to the proto-language. Proto-Baltic-Finnic even had an inherited noun *sija, which survives in Finnish as sija ‘space; place; position’.

The Latvian variant sijs: Gen. Sg. sijs¹⁸ probably puts us on the right track. This noun, which is a feminine with an i-stem, allows us to reconstruct the basic form *sijis. The Baltic nouns whose counterparts in Latvian and Lithuanian belong to the declension class of the i-stems were borrowed into Proto-Finnic almost exclusively as e-stems, that is, as words whose Nom. Sg. originally ended in -e. From the fact that both the Baltic ē-feminines and nearly all Baltic nouns that occur in Lithuanian and Latvian as inherited i-stems were borrowed into Proto-Finnic as words with an e-stem, I believe that one can only conclude that in the Old Baltic language from which the loanwords originate, the i-nouns had generally merged in their declension with the ē-feminines¹⁹. It should be noted that final -e had already changed to -i in Proto-Finnic. Cf. Finnish vuohi ‘goat’ < Proto-Finnic *voše < Baltic *ōžē (: Old Prussian wosee ‘same’); Finnish niisi ‘web louse’ (t>s before i) < Proto-Finnic *nite < Baltic *nītē (: Lithuanian nýtis ‘same’ and Latvian nīts ‘same’ i-stems). Incidentally, the feminine i-stems also show the ē-inflection dialectally in Lithuanian and Latvian.

¹⁷ Such riddles can be found, among others, in Bielenstein, Die Holzbauten und Holzgeräte der Letten (Petrograd, 1918), p. 26; Ancelāne, Latviešu tautas mīklas (Riga, 1954), p. 252 f.; Straubergs, Latviešu tautas mīklas, sakāmvārdi un parunas (Kopenhāgena, 1956), p. 253.

¹⁸ S. Mühlenbachs-Endzelīns, Latviešu valodas vārdnīca, III, (Riga, 1929), S. 836; Endzelīns-Hauzenberga, Papildinājumi un labojumi K. Mühlenbacha Latviešu valodas vārdnīcai, II (Rīga, 1946), S. 485.

¹⁹ S. Nieminen, Sitzungsberichte der Finnischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1956 (Helsinki, 1957), pp. 189 f., 192.

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accepted. Thus the Nom. Pl. is dialectally nýtés in Lithuanian (e.g. in Ariogala²⁰) and nītes in Latvian. Nowadays our words are used predominantly in the plural.

It is therefore to be expected that the Proto-Baltic Finns would have adopted into their language the noun occurring in Latvian as siis, in the phonological form *sije. If Itkonen has indicated the right path for explaining the course of development that led to the creation of the monosyllabic word form sii, then it can scarcely be doubted that *sije, as a Baltic loanword in Finnish, could only have yielded sii.

Even granting that the word for ‘beam’ under discussion was an ā-Feminine *sija in the Baltic source language, it is possible that it too could have been adopted into Proto-Baltic Finnic in the form *sije. One should not forget that the noun already mentioned above, *sija (>Finnish sija ‘space; place; position’), had long existed in the proto-language. It is conceivable that Proto-Baltic Finnic reacted against homonymy in this case and, upon adoption, transferred Baltic *sija into the e-declension.

That Finnish sii and Lithuanian sijà cannot rightly be separated from one another follows from what has just been established. In essence, the Finnish noun agrees so remarkably in form and meaning with the Baltic nouns I have compared that their association raises no reservations for me.

Judging from some Baltic nouns adopted into Proto-Baltic Finnic, the i-stem inflection seems to have been widespread in the source language. Nouns whose equivalents in Lithuanian are inflected exclusively as o-stems and in Latvian commonly as o- or ā-stems entered the i-declension. The preceding discussion shows that, in contrast to Lithuanian sijà and Latvian sija, a corresponding i-noun occurs only dialectally in Latvian. Finnish orsi ‘horizontal beam, pole; crossbar’ presupposes the Baltic proto-form *ardis, that is, an i-noun²¹. Its Lithuanian counterpart ārdas ‘horizontal movable pole in a grain-drying barn for drying sheaves; pole on which flax is hung to dry’ belongs to the o-stem declension class. Latvian ārds ‘horizontal movable drying-beam in a grain-drying barn for drying sheaves; horizontal beam, pole for drying or smoking’ likewise belongs to this class: Gen. Sg. ārda. Only in Latvian is there a variant belonging to the i-declension, namely ārds (<*ardis): Gen. Sg. ārds²². Finnish nuode ‘brother-in-law, husband of one’s sister’ can be traced back to the Baltic i-masculine *žnōtis.

²⁰ Elisonas, Archivum Philologicum, III (Kaunas, 1932), S. 159.

²¹ S. Nieminen, Virittäjä, XLIX (Helsinki, 1945), SS. 524 ff., 632, Sitzungsberichte der Finnischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1956 (Helsinki, 1957), S. 199.

²² On the cognate group of Lithuanian ārds, see now E. Fraenkel, Litauisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, I (Heidelberg, 1962), p. 15.

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back²³. From this inherited i-masculine, the noun znuōtis ‘son-in-law; brother-in-law, husband of one’s sister’ arose in Latvian, having shifted into the declension of io-masculines. Since Latvian znuōtis is recorded exclusively in the old Curonian region, it is evident that the kinship term in question belongs to the inheritance of Old Curonian in the Latvian language. Elsewhere in Latvia, znuōts is used; as an o-stem, it presupposes the earlier form *žnōtas. It should also be noted that znuōtis and znuōts are entirely synonymous expressions²⁴.

Just as Finnish nuode can only derive from Old Curonian, so it is quite likely that Finnish orsi and sii, too, originated in Old Curonian words. In both cases, the Proto-Baltic Finns adopted both the object and the word from the Balts. Since the i-stem inflection is absent in the corresponding Lithuanian nouns, one cannot in any way posit a Lithuanian source.

Helsinki

FINNISH SII

Э. НИЭМИНЕН

Summary

The article disputes Toivonen’s and Itkonen’s views that the Finnish word sii is of Finno-Ugric origin. The author also disagrees with Valonen, who considered Finnish sii a borrowing from Swedish. In the author’s opinion, Finnish sii should be classified as a borrowing from the Baltic languages; cf. Lithuanian sijà, Latvian sija: Lithuanian siẽti, Latvian siēt. Neither the semantic nor the phonetic aspects of the words mentioned above contradict this assumption.

FINNISH SII

E. NIEMIENAS

Summary

The author of the article disagrees with Toivonen’s and Itkonen’s explanation of the origin of Finnish sii, since they consider this word to be of Finno-Ugric origin. He also disagrees with Valonen, who considers Finnish sii a borrowing from Swedish. In the author’s opinion, Finnish sii should be regarded as a borrowing from the Baltic languages; cf. Lithuanian sijà, Latvian sija: Lithuanian siẽti, Latvian siēt. Neither the meaning nor the phonetics of these words would contradict this assumption.

²³ S. Nieminen, Lingua Posnaniensis, V (Poznań, 1955), S. 81, Sitzungsberichte der Finnischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 1956 (Helsinki, 1957), S. 192 ff., Virittäjä, LXI, (Helsinki, 1957), S. 25 f., Rakstu krājums, veltījums akadēmiķim profesoram dr. Jānim Endzelīnam viņa 85 dzīves un 65 darba gadu atcerei (Rīga, 1959), S. 205 f.

²⁴ Über die Sippe von znuōtis s. Pokorny, Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, I (Bern-München, 1959), S. 373 f.