Abstract

In this article, I examine the etymology of the Skolt Saami words paa(s) ‘angry; bad, evil’ and pann ‘bad; tiny’ and compare them to possibly related words in other Saami languages, mainly the North Saami words bahá ‘angry; bad, evil’ and bás ‘tiny’. It is well known that the North Saami word bahá is a Finnic loanword (cf. Finnish paha ‘bad, evil’). The Skolt Saami word paas is etymologically connected to the North Saami word bahá. The Skolt Saami word pann is a later variant of the word paas. I suggest that the Skolt Saami word paas and the North Saami word bahá both reflect the same Finnic loanword, which either 1) was borrowed to one of the Saami languages, presumably North Saami, and was subsequently borrowed in between the Saami idioms all the way to South Saami in the south and Ter Saami in the east, losing its -h- in the eastern Saami languages due to the lack of the phoneme /h/ in them at the time, or 2) was borrowed simultaneously to different Saami languages from Finnish or perhaps from Karelian for the eastern languages. I also ponder on the possibility that this borrowing might be older than is hitherto thought, perhaps dating back even to late Proto-Saami. The North Saami word bás ‘tiny’ might be a borrowing from the Eastern Saami paas, in spite of the different meanings. It is further suggested that the word pann arose in Skolt and Kildin Saami through reanalysis of the word pannalla ‘badly, poorly’ < paa-nalla < paa ‘bad’ + nalla ‘in … way’.