Sevindj Nurkiyazova writes about “the clues that eventually led linguists to discover who the Proto-Indo-Europeans were,” beginning with a striking illustration of a word that has stuck around in recognizable form:
One of my favorite words is lox,” says Gregory Guy, a professor of linguistics at New York University. There is hardly a more quintessential New York food than a lox bagel—a century-old popular appetizing store, Russ & Daughters, calls it “The Classic.” But Guy, who has lived in the city for the past 17 years, is passionate about lox for a different reason. “The pronunciation in the Proto-Indo-European was probably ‘lox,’ and that’s exactly how it is pronounced in modern English,” he says. “Then, it meant salmon, and now it specifically means ‘smoked salmon.’ It’s really cool that that word hasn’t changed its pronunciation at all in 8,000 years and still refers to a particular fish.”
The piece continues with a description of how the Indo-European family was discovered, and then gets back to the lox:
[…]In several thousand years, most words change beyond recognition, like the word wheel, which initially might have sounded “kʷékʷlos.” But there were some remarkable exceptions—like the timeless lox.
The family tree of the Indo-European languages sprawls across Eurasia, including such different species as English and Tocharian B, an extinct language once spoken on the territory of Xinjiang in modern China. In Tocharian B, the word for “fish/salmon” is laks, similar to German lachs, and Icelandic lax—the only ancestor all these languages share is the Proto-Indo-European. In Russian, Czech, Croatian, Macedonian, and Latvian, the [k] sound changed to [s,] resulting in the word losos.
This kind of millennia-long semantic consistency also appears in other words. For example, the Indo-European porkos, similar to modern English pork, meant a young pig. “What is interesting about the word lox is that it simply happened to consist of sounds that didn’t undergo changes in English and several other daughter languages descended from Proto-Indo-European,” says Guy. “The sounds that change across time are unpredictable, and differ from language to language, and some may not happen to change at all.”
The word lox was one of the clues that eventually led linguists to discover who the Proto-Indo-Europeans were, and where they lived. The fact that those distantly related Indo-European languages had almost the same pronunciation of a single word meant that the word—and the concept behind it—had most likely existed in the Proto-Indo-European language. “If they had a word for it, they must have lived in a place where there was salmon,” explains Guy. “Salmon is a fish that lives in the ocean, reproduces in fresh water and swims up to rivers to lay eggs and mate. There are only a few places on the planet where that happens.”
It goes without saying that there are errors and confusing statements in the piece (it is, after all, popular online journalism); I’ve avoided some of them in picking excerpts, but it should be clarified that while losos is the word in Czech, Croatian, and Macedonian, in Russian it’s the slightly different лосось (lososʹ) (with a palatalized s at the end), and Latvian has lasis with entirely different vowels. “If they had a word for it, they must have lived in a place where there was salmon” is oversimplified — the word could have meant something different in PIE times. Also, as a copyeditor (ret’d) I have to point out that the piece is missing an open quote at the beginning, and the comma should come after, not before, the bracket in “[s,].” (Thanks, Trevor!)
The story here is tremendously jumbled. To not mention William Jones or Franz Bopp in a history of Indo-European is truly bizarre. It also seems wrong to mention the story of Lachs without also mentioning how it sent linguists on a wild goose chase searching for the Indo-European homeland on the Baltic coast for decades. Indeed, if you’re going to bring up *lok̑sos you surely *have* to mention that it probably, in the context of the Caucasian or Anatolian hypotheses, actually referred to the salmontrout. (It’s not even as if it’s an even vaguely important find for Indo-European history – it wasn’t identified until the late 19th century, and even then, it was only held by extreme radicals to be common Indo-European until the Tocharian discovery.) *h₁ek̑u̯os is far more significant both to the currently accepted homeland hypotheses, and to the IE family in general. (Descendants are found in every branch.)
A very strange article indeed.
I could also note here my own heretical theory about the Lachs-word: that it isn’t Indo-European after all, but a common loanword from Uralic (or some other substrate) into the Balto-Slavic, Germanic, and Tocharian families. But I need a Uralist to confirm whether this is really tenable.
I’m a bit surprised anything Uralic would be borrowed with *ḱ.
Anyway, the extreme stability of lox is a massive Duke of York maneuver: *ḱs > *[xs] > [ks], *o > *[ɑ] > [ɒ̠] > [ɔ] > whatever it now is in New Yorkese. And then there’s the *-os somewhere under the carpet.
BTW, this would have been a wonderful opportunity to mention lakh “100,000”…
… the comma should come after, not before, the bracket in “[s,].”
For a similar reason the period ending your sentence there should come after, not before, the closing quotation mark. Square bracket pairs, just like quotation mark pairs, delimit an autonomous, indivisible part of the sentence. Punctuation for the sentence has no business leaking into the atoms of which the sentence is composed.
Is it Chicago to which you swear allegiance ?
BTW, this would have been a wonderful opportunity to mention lakh “100,000”…
I left that opportunity for you!
For a similar reason the period ending your sentence there should come after, not before, the closing quotation mark.
Bzzt. Those are entirely different situations. US style guides generally mandate periods and commas before, not after, close quotes; I am quite sure you will not find any such mandates to put them before a phonetic bracket.
Lox is a Yiddish loanword, so there isn’t an uninterrupted chain of sound changes. The English cognate is lax, “now chiefly dialectal”.
I forgot…
The first vowel is cognate. The second is different; AFAIK, the default explanation would be “the word was switched over to the i-stems at some point for, presumably, some reason”.
Ha, yes, “massive Duke of York maneuver” would be just as good clickbait as “hasn’t changed at all in 8,000 years”, and far more correct!
Victor Mair blogged this same article at Language Log in 2020 and found it questionable enough to ask Don Ringe, who said basically what David M just said.
If Standard English and Scots had kept the inherited lax, the Duke of York maneuver would’ve ended up at a different vowel. (The OED, in an entry from 1902, thought this had gone obsolete and then been re-borrowed from Swedish or Norwegian, but maybe it existed or still exists in English dialects that hadn’t been surveyed yet in 1902. DSL calls it obsolete, with a last citation from 1819.)
Prof. Guy is a sociolinguist, not a historical linguist; too bad the interview didn’t touch on his actual work on variation and language contact in New York City English and Brazilian Portuguese. Oh well, I guess the Mario Pei principle applies.
this would have been a wonderful opportunity to mention lakh “100,000”…
Ahem. 1,00,000.
The first vowel is cognate.
Perhaps you thought I was making some kind of historical analysis; I was pointing out on the most basic, obvious level that “In Russian, Czech, Croatian, Macedonian, and Latvian, the [k] sound changed to [s,] resulting in the word losos” is wrong because the Latvian word is not losos.
The lakh-lox connection is apparently due to Paul Thieme’s 1953 Die Heimat der indogermanischen Gemeinsprache. Not having the original at hand, I’ll quote from Hoenigswald’s favorable review:
Oh. I misread the original sentence.
From Skt. lakṣa ‘100,000, innumerably many’ …
Apparently this gives a name to the celebrated SE Asian dish, on account of its innoomerable nudles or perhaps its wide range of ingredients or cultural origins. A great joy to wander in the backjalans of Bali, Singapore, and the like, picking out bits of Sanskrit. Another for the collection. But how likely is this etymology, in fact?
The name Lakshadweep means “one lakh islands” in Malayalam, though the Laccadive Islands are just one part of the archipelago of no more than a hundred islands.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakshadweep
lohikäärme
Finnish
Alternative forms
louhikäärme
Etymology
Partial calque of Old Swedish floghdraki (“flying snake”); lohi + käärme. Originally louhikäärme (louhi ‘boulder’), the initial component became lohi (“salmon”) by folk etymology.
Pronunciation
IPA(key): /ˈlohiˌkæːrmeˣ/, [ˈlo̞ɦiˌkæːrme̞(ʔ)]
Rhymes: -æːrme
Syllabification: lo‧hi‧käär‧me
Noun
lohikäärme
1. dragon, drake
2. wyvern
Synonym: traakki
Usage notes
Most Finns do not make a difference between a “wyvern” (traakki) and “dragon” (lohikäärme), and would use lohikäärme to refer to both.
The relationship between lakh and *lok̑sos (and indeed, all of Thieme’s original suggestions for Indic cognates) have been well refuted. There are chronological issues (you would need the word to have showed up with these senses in the period before Indic speakers left the area where salmon/salmontrout swim, otherwise the word must have died out before it could have picked up any extended meaning), semantic ones (all of Thieme’s proposed meanings are a bit of a stretch), and sound (in that all the proposed descendants can equally well be explained by derivations from other IE words).
The point about *k̑ (or rather the distribution of sounds in the Lachs-words in Germanic and Balto-Slavic which point to an original *k̑) in Uralic loanwords is a good one, thank you.
When I read about resilient words I always think about Semerano writing about akkadian manu/mene/mina (hand/moon/month/money/counting etc.). That’s quite a old word and it’s also on the flag of Phaeacians…
Why? That didn’t happen in Tocharian, where it means “fish”.
Because an integral part of Thieme’s arguments explaining the semantic shifts have to do with things specific to the salmon: on the one hand, that the salmon (and not any other kind of fish) was particularly highly prized by the Indo-Europeans, or that salmon in particular were observed to swim upstream in large numbers (supposedly explaining how the sense came to be transferred to such a large number). In other words, he posits a direct link between the meanings observed in Sanskrit and properties of the salmon itself. (Recall also that Thieme specifically argued for a Baltic homeland and that the Lachs-word for him referred only to the Atlantic salmon.)
Thieme’s exact combination of arguments is definitely dead, but that doesn’t mean something quite similar can stand (e.g. the word readily applied to any fish that was at least pink on the inside, freshwater fish are routinely plentiful in preindustrial waters…).
freshwater fish are routinely plentiful in preindustrial waters…
They definitely are. Father told me they had had* a weir across a river near their backyard**, and the fish caught were mostly fed to the 100 to 200 ducks they kept.
*In the 1920s
**Tamga
Looks to me like “Lakshadweep” was directly lifted out of Samscrick (which Malayalam may have done), while “Laccadive” is the same in Prakrit.
@Noetica: Apparently [Skt. lakṣa] gives a name to the celebrated SE Asian dish, on account of its innoomerable nudles or perhaps its wide range of ingredients or cultural origins. A great joy to wander in the backjalans of Bali, Singapore, and the like, picking out bits of Sanskrit. Another for the collection. But how likely is this etymology, in fact?
Asam Laksa has been one of my favourite dishes since I was introduced to it when I visited Southeast Asia. Recently, I found a place that had Asam Laksa on the menu and ordered it, only to be massively disappointed when they brought out the more common Curry Laksa… Oh, where was I?
The etymology of laksa has been discussed here before, in connection with Yiddish lokshen, meaning noodles:
Which brings us to:
However, Wiktionary says “From Min Nan 辣沙 (‘spicy sand’).”
The Hokkien reading of 辣 would be la̍t (literary) or loa̍h (vernacular), while 沙 would be sa/see (literary) or soa/se (vernacular). Not sure I buy it, as it seems a likely candidate for a folk-etymological reanalysis by Hokkien speakers who encountered the name.
The OED doesn’t give the native spelling for the presumed Persian etymon, but a quick search shows that لاکشه lākša (or لاخشه lāḵša among many possible variants) is an obsolete word for noodle. I can’t find much beyond that.
Finnish Laksatiivi must be an early Indo-Iranian loan.
The relationship between lakh and *lok̑sos (and indeed, all of Thieme’s original suggestions for Indic cognates) have been well refuted.
Doubtless. But what is not a source may still be a parallel or an analogue.
Finnish Laksatiivi
No doubt originally made up of the laksa in question and tiivis ‘tight, dense’ and meant to be taken to achieve the opposite outcome. Along the way, though, it must have lost its final -s and reversed its meaning.
No, laksatiivi is from an unattested Indo-Aryan synonym of the Sanskrit senokot, where the first element is sena “army” (in the sense “host, as of salmon”) and the second ultimately derives from Proto-World *kat “battle, protection, hail, headgear, fox” (here in the sense “hail, thunderous downpour.”)
https://languagehat.com/proto-indo-european-fox/#comment-4166311
Jongseong Park:
The etymology of laksa has been discussed here before.
Thanks for the Hatlink. I missed that discussion. And thanks for your excursus here. It seems the matter is not resolved. Convergent sources, perhaps.
Asam Laksa has been one of my favourite dishes since I was introduced to it when I visited Southeast Asia. Recently, I found a place that had Asam Laksa on the menu and ordered it, only to be massively disappointed when they brought out the more common Curry Laksa… Oh, where was I?
In Melbourne (Australia) it is possible to get an excellent curry laksa, as I would call it whenever I need to distinguish it from laksa asam. But nothing can match what is to be had in Singapore. I first experienced laksa asam (“sour laksa”) on Penang, and had others on the way by bus from there to Singapore. Personally I find a classic curry laksa unbeatable; but they are quite different dishes, and shouldn’t really be compared.
Pickled fruits in Penang were a great delight, especially the expertly pickled flesh of nutmegs.
What I learnt by bitter experience is that Laksa and white shirts are not a good combination 🙂
@hans
Or follow the Italian approach-lean a little forward and bite cleanly through noodles, ends with sauce drop on the plate or serviette (although a German friend makes me use another Italian approach involving pushing forkfuls on to a spoon, in Rome you would have to ask them for the spoon, because why use a spoon for sauce when you can use bread?).
@Noetica: Agreed that the two are completely different dishes and can’t really be compared. To clarify, my disappointment was due to not getting the Asam Laksa that I was promised, not because I have anything against the curry version, which is also excellent. But in most places the only kind of laksa that people know of or serve in restaurants (if they do so at all) seems to be the one with curry.
Quite so, JP. I felt the same situational disappointment with laksa asam when I had expected curry laksa; but I’m sure it too is a fine dish.
Finnic languages do have the *loḱs- word, but as David kind of points towards, in its Baltic guise with already an *š (that then develops to /h/), and also already an *i-stem: thus Finnish lohi, Estonian lõhi (and a few other variants). Similarly in the Samic languages, which, lacking an original *š, end up with *lōsə (modern reflexes include Northern Sami luossa, Southern Sami loese, Kildin Sami лӯсс /ɫuːsː/). No principled way to wring a /ks/ from this. And then in internal Russia, from where we would require some evidence to even begin to talk of Uralic origin, salmons proper are pretty much unknown. There’s a selection of other salmonid fishes around but nothing with even a remotely similar name. (The best-preserved etymon is ‘nelma’, Stenodus nelma; can be reconstructed as *onča in Proto-Uralic.)
Besides there fairly likely is no Uralic substrate in Balto-Slavic anyway (and almost certainly not in Germanic). Current-day thinking is that it’s the opposite: that there is, rather, a Balto-Slavic substrate in Proto-Finnic, which only arrived in the Baltic region about a millennium later than Indo-European did. “Some other substrate” might be workable of course (when is it ever not a possibility?).
(A Uralic substrate or at least some areal phenomena shared with Uralic in Tocharian is a currently hot research topic, however.)
You mean nelma comes from *onča? How?
No, *onča means ‘nelma’. (No idea where the Russian name is from.)
The attestation of the Russian name underlying nelma was given here in 2013, even if it gets us no closer to an explanation.
there fairly likely is no Uralic substrate in Balto-Slavic anyway (and almost certainly not in Germanic)
And what’s the current consensus on vimpa/vimma/vimba?
vimpa
Finnish
Etymology
Borrowed from Swedish vimba (later vimma).
Pronunciation
IPA(key): /ˈʋimpɑ/, [ˈʋimpɑ]
Rhymes: -impɑ
Syllabification: vim‧pa
Noun
vimpa
1. vimba (Vimba vimba)
2. vimba (fish of the genus Vimba)
Exactly as they say in Russian, Иван кивает на Петра, а Пётр кивает на Ивана.
Finnic etym. dictionaries seem to side with Swedish → Finnish (and Estonian, Livonian) → Russian. Skipping however over all more northern Fi. dialects and Karelian, Ludian, Veps, which would be pretty normal for recent Swedish loans. SSA claims that this might have a Swedish-internal etymology based on vimla ‘to teem’.
— Trond wondered there about jukso ‘haddock’ and congeners; this seems to be a little-known Northern dialect word from Northern Sami juksu, which has soundlawful *ws > /ks/ and does belong with Nordic ýsa etc. The similar Skolt teχ̄s̄, Kildin tėχ̄s (modern orth. tehhs and тыххs), Ter ti̮k̄sa belong with another Northern variant diksu which looks like it somehow went thru *j > *ć (common in loanwords from Scandinavian) > *ti (not really precedented to my knowledge, but I don’t know much about the Sea Sami varieties).
German wimmeln, so the word has a history in Germanic.
@JP: kiitos!
Another surprising etymology is this:
yaud
English
Etymology
From Middle English [Term?]. Originally used to mean “mare”, then “old mare”. From Old Norse jalda (“mare”), from a Uralic language, such as Moksha эльде (elʹde) or Erzya эльде (elʹde).[1][2]
This term influenced and was influenced by jade, but is considered etymologically distinct by some references,[1][2] while others consider the two terms to be variants of one another.[3]
Noun
yaud (plural yauds)
1. (Scotland, Northern England) A workhorse; an old or worn-out mare.
@dm
re wimmeln: Proto-Indo-European *wemh₁- (“to spew, vomit”). DWDS cites
“ahd. wimidōn (10. Jh.), wiumidōn, wimezzen, wamezzen (11. Jh.) ‘hervorsprudeln, voll sein, wimmeln’ eine Gruppe ursprünglich wohl onomatopoetischer Verben bildet, die auf bewegungsintensive Vorgänge übertragen werden” which shows a frequentative form like Latin vomitare, but does not give a PIE trace.
juha: Another surprising etymology
[yaud]
From Old Norse jalda (“mare”), from a Uralic language, such as Moksha эльде (elʹde) or Erzya эльде (elʹde).
Very much so. It’s just the kind of thing I love, but without corroborating evidence or a realistic path I’ll stay unconvinced.
That does have a realistic path at least, since there is a known Sami cognate; but unfortunately this is *āltō ‘reindeer cow’ (North áldu etc.), with no *j-. (Mordvinic does not retain the *jä- / *ä- contrast, not at least up to the current day; with some varieties having *jä- > ä-, e-, others *ä- > jä-.) Of course breaking *e-a > *ja-a would be a possibility for Nordic, but then was this really borrowed so early that either (1) pre-Samic still had *älto, or (2) pre-Nordic still had no *ā of its own, and for some reason substituted Samic *ā as *e (rather than *ǣ or *a?).
A 1997 article by Hofstra mentions an earlier proposal by de Vries that the loaning was not from Sami, but from a lost Finnic reflex **ältä, that could have retained a short front vowel longer… looking a bit less probable these days, now that the regular Finnic development of a west Uralic *ältä would be expected to be instead **alci : **altë- (or from a Sami-like *ältä-w, > **altu).
Both underived *-lt- and native animal husbandry terms are also very rare in Uralic, so whatever the details, this probably has some third original source anyway.
There is an uncommon English surname Youd, apparently of unknown origin. I mostly know of it because of Samuel Youd, which was the real name of the science fiction writer John Christopher.* However, Wikipedia says that the name is mostly associated with the region around the Dee Estuary (which forms the northernmost part of the boundary between England and Wales):
* The power of subtle linguistic clues to trigger memories can be very impressive, and Youd’s name is associated with one particular incident in my mind. I had suggested to my son that we should read one of John Christopher’s books. Only relatively recently had I learned that Christopher’s actual name was Samuel Youd, and that fact was not so strongly fixed in my memory as it now has become. We were at the library to pick up some summer reading, and I again mentioned checking out The White Mountains. At that point, I remembered that “John Christopher” was a pen name, but I had forgotten the author’s actual name, and I was puzzling over it, trying to remember. As we descended on the escalator to the children’s section, a table on which some of the staff’s reading suggestions were placed came into view. Among the books there was The Pool of Fire by Christopher. It was a cover I had never seen before—a fairly recent edition. However, just seeing the title and the nom de plume immediately triggered my memory of Youd’s actual name—along with the titles of a bunch of other things he had written. It was like I had a little locker filled with information about him tucked off somewhere toward the rear of my mind. I couldn’t find it for while, but then as soon as I saw some words associated with the author, the lock snicked open, and all the information tumbled out.
J Pystynen: whatever the details, this probably has some third original source anyway.
Yes. Baltic might be a reasonable first guess, but without an attested cognate or an IE etymology it’s just moving the problem.
Re loshad’, Vasmer mentions:
Окончание -дь ср. с др.-русск., цслав. ослѣдь ὄναγρος. || Стар. заимствование из тюрк.; ср. чув. lаšа «лошадь», тур., крым.-тат., тат., карач., балкар. аlаšа (Радлов 1, 365 и сл.; KSz 10, 86; 15, 200)
So there are two things : Turkic аlаšа and Slavic? suffix d’. What if the borrowing in to Uralic was from something like *alashad’. Could the second syllable have been elided, e.g., something like *alashad’ > *alaad’ > *al’da?
Before any phonetic considerations, there would be the general problem of getting anything from Turkic into Samic in the first place (if not just thru Russian).
A non-IE, non-Uralic substrate has been already hypothesized as a source of much agricultural and some animal husbandry vocabulary in the western Uralic branches… mostly not reflected in Samic, but then lack of agriculture up north would mostly also lead to that result anyway.
And I’m again surprised at this
лишме
Erzya, Moksha
Etymology
Cognate to Estonian lehm (“cow”) and Finnish lehmä (“cow”). Akin to Finnic.
Noun
лишме • (lišme)
1. horse:
Has there ever been such an animal?
Do click thru to PF *lehmä for some discussion of what might be up.
On Sanskrit लक्ष्मी (lakṣmī):
(Full circle back to the salmon word!)
Notice sense 4. Sanskrit is not Proto-Indo-Iranian, but there’s hardly a more iconic semantic shift than “wealth, riches” -> “livestock”.
Such a stage never existed; *ā does go back to Proto-Germanic even in first/only syllables as the regular outcome of *az followed by *r.
But if the Proto-Samic *ā wasn’t really long, that’s beside the point anyway…
An agricultural substrate in Southwest Uralic filtered through a RUKI dialect like Proto-Balto-Slavic or Proto-Indo-Iranian? The table is made with Corded Ware.
…Oops. Footnote 9 therein: the longer-known (e.g. Ringe 2006) loss of *j between identical vowels, a very rare source for *ā in Proto-Germanic, does have examples in first syllables, too: it “can be found in the anomalous stems *stai-/*stā- ‘stand’ and *ɣai-/*ɣā- ‘go’”.
[ON jalda “mare” < Uralic]
J Pystynen: That does have a realistic path at least, since there is a known Sami cognate; but unfortunately this is *āltō ‘reindeer cow’ (North áldu etc.), with no *j-.
I’d think there’s no need to account for Sami phonology, since semantics makes a Sami path look like a dead end anyway. But it’s likely that a shift “female horse” (-> “female pulling animal”) -> “female reindeer” took place into or just inside Sami, so the word must have been used for “mare” on the Baltic shores, and a hypothesized borrowing from Uralic must have been from a lost Finnic cognate or an even loster southern (Para-)Sami variety. But if this is substrate in Western Uralic anyway, I don’t know why a lost form there is preferable to one in Baltic. A Baltic loan would be unusual in Scandinavian, but not into Mordvinian or even with a semantic shift into Sami.
And if it’s Baltic, we must exclude IE inheritance before shouting substrate.
… all this to say that I want to make it a perfect or something of PIE *h₂el- “grow, nourish”, but I don’t think it works.
Or maybe it could be the *h₁el- of various horned animals, but I think the derivation would be meaningless, essentially leaving a root etymology.
the *h₁el- of various horned animals
Obviously cognate with Nawdm ɦiilu, Kusaal ɩɩl “horn” etc etc. It’s Scandi-Congo all the way down.
Sanskrit लक्ष्मी (lakṣmī)
Cf päkšnä
Reconstruction:Proto-Uralic/päkšnä
Proto-Uralic
Etymology
Likely a substrate loanword due to the three-consonant cluster, which is not native to Uralic.
Noun
*päkšnä
1. linden
Descendants
Mari: *pistə
Eastern Mari: пиште (pište)
Western Mari: пишты (pišty)
Proto-Mordvinic:
Erzya: пекше (pekše)
Moksha: [script needed] (päšä)
Proto-Finnic: *pähnä
Finnish: pärnä
Estonian: pärn
Võro: pähn
Not granted: if you compare with the case of lehmä / lišme, both could again represent narrowing from something broader, e.g. to the effect of “female ungulate”.
As far as root etymologies go, the comparison of that with ‘soft’, or for that matter the case of Finnish tamma ‘mare’ from Germanic ‘tame’, draws my attention within to Samic *ālkkē ‘easy’; a bit further off also *ālō ‘phloem’. A contracted adjective *älətä > *ältä would be conceivable, and there actually also seem to be some precedents in Northern Sami for -u as a deadjectival ending ‘one who/what is…’, even if they mostly look rather young and slangy; e.g. vildu ‘wild one’, njaŋgu ‘big/long one’ (njaŋggas ‘laying-about’; with non-native /ŋg/), bušku ‘narrow one’ (buškkas ‘narrow’; /šk/ probably indicates a loan from Eastern Sami), stoaidu ‘rude one’ (stoaiddas ‘rude’), skieddo ‘one in worn clothes’ (skiettas ‘worn (of fur)’).
J Pystynen: both could again represent narrowing from something broader, e.g. to the effect of “female ungulate”.
Conceded. But if so it’s still likely that the narrowing to “female reindeer” happened in Sami, while that to “mare” took place in SWU before it was borrowed by Scandinavian. Similarly with the deadjectival formation.
Katz 2003:188f on Finnish lehmä (mentioned above) is worth quoting in full (apologies for any uncaught OCR errors):
When reading the previous comments in this thread about a possible complex including (1) later Sanskrit lakṣam ‘100,000’ and (2) Proto-Finnic *lehmä ‘cow’ and Mordvinic ‘horse’ perhaps from a Pre-Indo-Iranian form related to Vedic lákṣman- ‘mark, sign’, lakṣmī́ḥ ‘mark, sign’, I was reminded of the Semitic complex possibly including Proto-Semitic *ʾalp- ‘ox, head of cattle’, West Semitic *ʾalp- ‘thousand’, and the root ʾlp (Arabic form I ألف ʾalifa; with notions of ‘keep to, resort to, frequent, be familiar with, become friendly, become tame, bring together, join’; compare Hebrew אָלַף ʾālap̄ ‘learn’, אַלּוּף ʾallūp̄ ‘tame, docile; friend, intimate; leader’; Aramaic אלף ʾlp ‘learn’, D stem ‘teach’; Syriac ܐܠܦ allep ‘teach’, etc., if these are not all ultimately just denominative from ‘ox’). Some scholars have sought to unify these under a single Semitic root. Just a meretricious coincidence?
(If curious LH readers would like to follow up and read Thieme’s kitchen-sink approach to the Indo-European salmon word for themselves, here is a digitized version. Thieme evokes the Semitic parallel, but from a different angle, on p. 553.)