Linguaphile wrote:I'm curious: Naava, does what Ainurakne described sound similar to how the two words are used in Finnish?
Yup, 100% agree!
The roof was the first thing to come to my mind, too. You build 4 x sein(ä) to support the roof, but a muuri/müür never has a roof. (At least I can't think of any example where it could have a roof.)
Muuri is basically a fence that's made of bricks or stones or some other material like that. And like ainurakne said, you use sein(ä) to create a space but muuri/müür to separate people.
And like in Estonian, masonry is called muuraus in Finnish, laying the bricks is called muuraaminen, and the person doing it is muurari, and the stuff you put between the bricks is muurilaasti... So I guess you could say bricks are important when it comes to building a muuri.
So.
Sisäseinä (indoors), ulkoseinä (outdoors).
Muuri, muuri and muuri.
Aita, kuusiaita. (Fences)
Linguaphile wrote:Both are loans; müür from Germanic, sein from Baltic.
Conclusion: walls were unknown to the Finnic peoples before that. Is this how etymology works?
I checked and it seems it's possible both sein(ä) and muuri/müür were loaned into the Proto-Finnic language. But I wonder why Estonian has ü while Finnish has u...
Linguaphile wrote:. . . the words that mean sein in more distantly-related languages like Udmurt, Mari, Komi, Mansi, and Khanty are apparently related to Estonian pars (in the photo, not the walls but the horizontal beams with the luggage on top, normally/traditionally used for drying) and Finnish parsi.
First of all, I didn't know that's called parsi. I had heard of parsinavetta and I know that navetta is a cowshed, but I had never started to think what that parsi means.
And that thing in the Estonian pic, I'd call it parvi. It's suspiciously close to parsi, but I couldn't find any info about its etymology so we can only guess if it's a coincidence or not.
ainurakne wrote:I think both should be okay, although müür feels a lot more logical. After all, müür is a heavy-duty fence that you build to keep something or someone out, or to keep something or someone in.
This is why I changed the translation to muuri.