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LARS -GUNNAR LARSSON
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the development of the South Saami sound system that provides an explana-
tion to the correspondence Scand. þ- ~ SaaS. h- in Hovre. The explanations
do not necessarily exclude one another. However that question is resolved,
there remains the vowel problem: here, the long Scandinavian ō is rendered
by -ov- , not by the diphthong -uo-. Does that indicate that the diphthongisa-
tion had also taken place when the name of the thunder god was borrowed?
Southern Saami
Northern
Saami
Proto-Saami /
< Scand. Older FU form Meaning
SaaS. hibmie N. dapmi *θümä, *θimä *ßümä, ß imä ‘glue’
SaaS. hïŋse N. daŋas *θiŋis ??* ßiŋis, δiŋis ‘twigs’
SaaS. haabbe N. dab’bâ *θāmpə ‘protuberant part
of a bone’
SaaS. hâvva N. duvva ??skand. θúva ‘a bone’
SaaS. fuome N. duopma *θōmi *ßōmi ‘bird-cherry’
SaaU. füöhpət L. tuohppit Scand. θova – ‘to fet’
SaaS. hovre(n)- – Scand. θórr – ‘the god of thunder’
The important thing in this etymology is, however, not the vocalism, but
the fact that the initial continuative in SaaS. hovre(n)- must reflect a con-
tinuative (cf. Rydving 2012: 164). A Scandinavian occlusive would have
been rendered by a Saami occlusive, as in SaaS. taake ‘roof’ < Scand., cf.
Sw. tak ‘roof; ceiling’ < þak. In present-day Swedish and Norwegian, the
thunder god is called Tor, the old fricative þ has developed into an occlusive,
Tor. This means that the form hovre(n)- must have been taken over before
this sound change took place in Scandinavian languages. The undisputed,
common opinion among scholars in Scandinavistics is that this development
took place ”at the latest around 1400” (Wessén 1968: 82). This gives us a
terminus ante quem for the borrowing, but there is also a terminus post
quem. In the west Germanic languages the name of the thunder god has a
nasal – Eng. Thunder, Ger. Donner – which has disappeared in Old Scandina-
vian (Sköld 1985: 65 f.; Rydving 2012: 163). No nasal is reflected in SaaS.
Hovre- and therefore Sköld (1985: 66) concludes that the word ”was appa-
rently borrowed during the Viking age or during the Early Middle Ages”.
6. The contacts between southern Saami and Scandinavians
Yngvar Nielsen (1891) and Wiklund (1925) assumed that the southern
Saami arrived in their present areas in the 17th or 18th century viz. after the