Tüve roobas ~ rööbas päritolust
The etymology of Estonian roobas ~ rööbas ‘rut; rail’

Summary/Abstract: The Estonian roobas ~ rööbas ‘rut; rail’ has been compared to Finnish ruopas ‘heap of stones, pack of ice’, ryöpäs ‘heap of gravel’, Karelian ruopas ‘heap of stones, pack of ice’, Lude ruopaz ’heap of stones’ and Veps roppaz ‘pack ice’. As this North Finnic stem is probably borrowed from the same languages, the Estonian stem seems to have no cognate language equivalents. This fact indicates that the Estonian stem could be a younger loanword, but the structure of the stem (a contracted noun ending in ­as in nom. sg.) is not typical of younger loanwords. the analysis of the data of the Estonian dialects and of 17th–19th century lexicographic sources shows that this structure of the stem may be secondary, as there are many variants with different structures, e.g. roobe, rööbe, rööp in dialects, roop, rööp, rōbe, rȫbe, pl. rope(d) [roope(d)], röpe [rööpe] in the 17th–19th century dictionaries. Thus the earlier stem variant was probably monosyllabic in nom. sg., i.e. roop ~ rööp, with variable stem-final vowels in oblique cases (­a in the 18th­century dictionaries, ­e in the 19th­century dictionaries). The stem roop ~ rööp could have been borrowed from Low German grope ‘groove, channel’. The semantic shift ‘groove, channel’ > ‘rut’ has taken place in Estonian. The different quality of the vowel of the first syllable in Estonian may reflect the variable pronunciation in Low German. A parallel borrowing in Latvian, gruo͂ pe ‘groove; rut’, indirectly supports the Low German loan source. Swedish grope ‘hole, pit’ can be considered as a loan source of the stem variant roop including a back vowel as well. The borrowing of different forms (nom. sg. and nom. pl.) of the donor language separately and several donor languages (Low German, Swedish) could explain the variability of the stem in Estonian dialects and in the old lexicographic sources.

• Details
• Contents