HI, excellent post!
Although; as you state "linguists debate" and this is one of part of that debate. According to the currently (here in Finland) favorite theory, the word puukko comes from the word pook that refers to a small sheath knife, commonly carried by salt traders from lower Saxony that traveled through out the Nordic region. The other and older theory is indeed that word puukko evolved in the same manner as the word suukko: puu (wood) -> puukko, suu (mouth) -> suukko (a kiss) or it can refer to the fact that the knife has a wooden handle... The problem here is, that in the beginning the sheath knives were referred to as veitsi and the word puukko is indeed first encountered in the medieval period. And that during the so called "national romantic" period, a lot of crappy research was done on subjects such as art, language, food, dressing, migration etc. etc. Even today one can still encounter some of the wackier theories in news papers and "entertainment" periodicals...
Thanks for the compliment! I'm an old-fashioned guy, I guess. I have a hard time reconciling the
pook hypothesis with Pokorny's work on the
*p(x) roots in proto-IE. But I'm willing to learn new ideas so if you have a reference, by all means send it. My schooling is never over. And the more I think about it, the old "wood" etymology does smell like Isidore of Seville
Zieg
Edit: Since this post I have taken up my own challenge. Using the Finnish Wikipedia article as a starting point I have attempted to find the sources for the "pook" hypothesis for the Finnish word and all I can come up with is additional hearsay. There are, furthermore, only seven documents remaining in the Old Saxon language and none of them contains the word "pook." One post here in Bladeforums, and cross posted in a firearms forum, mentioned the word "pook" as a "Friesian-Saxon" word but the old Frisian dialects are less well-attested than Saxon, and they, too, have no mention of the word "pook." Because of the paucity of sources, these languages are documented completely online, which makes searching for the word easy. "Messer," "schwert," "knife," "sword," "blade," and so on only yield the usual suspects (most of the scholars wrote in German and English). And Julius Pokorny, as old as his work may be, does not have any version of this word and his theoretical Proto Indo-European roots do nothing to help the idea of "puukko" having any IE, to say nothing of Germanic, origin.
Every mention of the "pook" hypothesis comes from posts written by Finnish authors, so this must lead back to a Finnish article somewhere, but it just doesn't have any referent in any primary source I can get my hands on. Until I do, I'm not buying it. The ball is in your court, Finns! This once-professional/now amateur historian and linguist is unconvinced but waiting with an open mind for your sources to carry the day. Find me the original scholarly reference or a primary source!
Zieg
OK, I get to give myself a dope-slap! Pokorny gives us *peu (which we should vocally render "peh-yoo") as a Proto Indo-European "sharp", which my caffeine-starved brain missed. This takes us to Latin "pugio," that famous Roman sidearm, Greek "pygme" (that's an upsilon, so pronounced "poog-may"), from which we get "fist" and all the punching-related words. Oh, and then there's the English "poke"!!! The Indo-European root is there and the "pook" hypothesis has good basis. I still want the Saxon references, of course, but I can't argue the rest of it anymore.
(What's Finnish for "D'oh!"?). :foot:
Zieg
