Re: "Wife" (was: Homosexuality etc.)

>From: John Cowan <cowan@...>
>Subject:      [CONLANG] "Wife" (was: Homosexuality etc.)
>
>Speaking of Gothic, what's up with "aithei" [eTi] for "mother"?  It got
into
>Finnish as "äiti", but I can't find anything on its etymology.
>Or did it (bizarrely) actually *come from* some kind of proto-Finnic?
According to my books, it is a loanword into Finnish from some Germanic language,
probably Gothic. I assume that if it was a native word, the ti > si sound
change would not have left it alone; instead, it was borrowed after that
sound change.

>The Uralic root is something totally different, which now survives in
>Finnish in the sense "animal mother, dam".
_emo_ or _emä_ (a-umlaut).

(And Tristan, the word for a water dam is _pato_. =)


- M. Astrand

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