Nyelvtudományi közlemények 91. kötet (1990)

104 JUHA JANHUNEN
problem: the Komi word was borrowed by the Nenets with the specialized
meaning 'sheepskin', for sheepskins represented the only commercially important
type of skin that the Komi had and the Nenets did not have. It
can be concluded that the first information about sheep breeding reached
the Samoyed tundras not through the Russians but through the Komi. This
is, of course, completely congruous with what is otherwise known of the
cultural history of the region.
As to the chronology of the borrowing, the wide distribution of the word
in the Tundra Nenets dialects as well as the semantic change from 'sheepskin'
to 'sheep' suggest that /xu/ may well be one of the earliest items of
Komi vocabulary to have penetrated intő Nenets. In fact, the borrowing
most probably took place during the initial stages of the Izhma Komi expansion.
It may be added that the Komi word /ku/ was once much later,
in the 19th Century, recorded from a bilingual Tundra Nenets speaker as a
direct citation loan in the meaning 'leather' (Schrenk/Swv. 72, cf. Türkin
1985. 195). By that time, the relationship between Komi /ku/ and Nenets
/xu/ had probably become quite obscure even in the minds of bilingual
speakers of both languages.
From the point of view of absolute chronology, it is relevant to note that
the Nenets stem /xu/ was already recorded in its modem meaning in the
17th and 18th centuries. The early sources know the word only as a deminutive
derivative: Goewoetza 'Schaep' ~ Clioewoctza' 'een Pels' (Witsen/SWv.
6-7), e nycmo3epcKOM oup. xymi,h 'öapan' (LTOVC 2.62), /xu(a)Ca/ (it
seems futile to speculate about the vocalism of the stem, as reflected in
the inadéquate transcription used in the old sources). Incidentally, the same
derivative is still dialectally preserved today, although it may have lost its
specific référence to the sheep or sheepskins: 3an. xyv,s{ /xuCa/ 'o^eiuio H3
mKyp' (NRS 787). There is also one early occurrence of the phrase /xuhgoba/,
written down in the 18th Century, but this was allegedly recorded
in the Enets language: Manra3eíícKaro oKpyra xynxo6a '6apaH'. It remains
an archaeographical task to investigate whetlier the information really
cornes form Enets, in which case the Nenets phrase would have been présent
in Enets as a loanword, or whetlier it is just a question of misplacement of
the lexical material (the phrase is also certainly misspelled in the source).
As a diachronic curiosity, it may be mentioned that the Komi word /ku/
is of Common Uralic origin and ultimately identical with Nenets /xoba/
(KESK 143, UKS 252). Thus, the Nenets phrase /xuh-goba/ represents a
very special kind of figura etymologica, with the two components united
after several millenia of séparation.
The cultural conclusion of the etymological resuit presented above is
that the Tundra Nenets originally became familiär with the sheep as the
Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 91. 1990.