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T
HE
E
ARLIEST
C
ONTACTS BETWEEN
S
CANDINAVIANS AND
S
OUTH
S
AAMI
171
The word
Hovre
and its compounds – all conected to the thunder god – are re-
stricted to southern South Saami, even if one case out of five is registered also in
central South Saami. The late loanword SaaS.
howrà
‘whore’ is taken down
in Vefsen alone and its pronunciation is almost identical with that in Swedish.
5. Summing up
To sum up, there were in Proto-Saami two phonemes
*
/t/
and
*/θ/, which
derived from separate phonemes in Proto-Finno-Ugric. Neither Finnish, nor
northern Saami languages show any difference as to how these sounds are
rendered. In South and Ume Saami, however, theses phonemes have differ-
ent representations: the old occlusive remains an occlusive, whereas PS *
θ
is
represented by a continuative. Even if the examples are few, we can distin-
guish between two different representations of PS *
θ
depending on phonetic
context: in front of a non-labial vowel
h-
but in front of a labial vowel
f-
.
This development seems to be regular to ”southern Saami in a broad sense of
the word”, i.e. South Saami and Ume Saami.
In the first phase then, PS *
θ-
developed into
h-
in southern Saami, which,
of course, affected both inherited words, like *
θimä
‘glue’ and *
θōmi
‘bird-
cherry’, and loanwords, like
θōva
‘to felt’. Ume Saami developed in the
same way as South Saami, as can be seen in the word for ‘glue’ attested in
seven out of the nine varieties in my investigation into Ume Saami variation
(Larsson 2012): in each variety where this word is found, we find an initial
h-
, eg. ST
hïppmìe
, Msk.
hippmē
, i.e. the same development as in SaaS.
hib-
mie
. At some time in this early phase the Scandinavian word for ‘whore’ –
OSw.
hōra
etc – has been borrowed.
After this, the change *
huo-
>
fuo-
took place, which is regular in the
southernmost languages: SaaS.
fuome
, SaaU.
füöhpət
and
SaaU.
fuarra
. It
might seem strange from a cultural point of view that the textile term ‘to felt’
was taken over earlier than the name of the thunder god, since the textile
term OSw.
thova
is not attested until 1450 (SO s.v.), whereas the name of the
thunder god is known in runic Swedish. The felted cloth, however, is known
from prehistoric finds and the Swedish word for this kind of cloth appears for
the first time in a written text in 1292 (Nationalencyklopedin s.v.).
After the development *
huo-
>
fuo-
had taken place, the name of the
thundergod, ON.
Þōr
etc., was borrowed into (southern) South Saami, where
it got the form
hovre
. According to Sköld (1985: 65), ”[t]he most probable”
explanation is that the South Saami substituted Scandinavian
þ
with
h
, when
taking over the word. So instead of the unfortunate homonymy, it could be