Woods wrote:Virankannos wrote:There is an etymological database of the Saami languages online:
http://kaino.kotus.fi/algu/It contains Finnish words as well, and you can search by language. If there's a specific word whose etymology you're interested in, I recommend checking it out.
Virankannos, onko se paremmin etymologinen sanakirja netissä? Yritin etsiä sanan "tiedä", se ei löytänyt sitä.
You will need to look up the infinitive form. For
tiedä, that means you look up
tietää.
Wiktionary will sometimes help you if you don't know the infinitive form:
here's what you get when you look up tiedä there, and if you click on the link it will take you to
the entry for tietää, which gives its etymology, which is from Proto-Finnic
teetädäk, itself derived from a word meaning "road, way" (
tie in Finnish,
*tee in Proto-Finnic). And from there you can also go to the
entry for teetädäk as well, and find even more cognates in various languages.
Here is the
entry from the etymological database of the Saami languages that Virankannos posted. It lists cognates in Saami languages, as well as in a few other related languages (in this case: Finnish and about ten different varieties of Saami) and also alludes to a possible Germanic origin, which it doesn't really explain.
The information listed for
tietää at Suomisanakirja.fi similarly lists cognates in a few related languages (in the case of tietää, it gives cognates for Estonian, Karelian and North Saami) and also the English translation.
Another source I often use, which will probably be less useful to you (because it's in Estonian), is Eesti etümoloogiasõnaraamat (Estonian Etymological Dictionary). You pretty much have to know the Estonian cognate to use it effectively, and then the entry you get is also in Estonian. But if you can manage to understand it, it gives a good amount of information; in the
entry for tietää (found by searching for the Estonian equivalent
teadma), it lists Finnish, Livonian, Votic, Ingrian, Karelian, Ludic, and Vepsian cognates, and gives two possible etymologies, one of which explains the "Germanic" reference from the Saami etymological dictionary (it says it may either be from the Finnic word for "
path" or from the Proto-Germanic word
*stē via Old Swedish
stā "to stand, to endure", also related to Finnish
sietää "to endure, tolerate"). Within that entry, you can also click on the word for "path" (
tee in Estonian) and it will take you to the entry for that word, which shows that the Finnish cognate there is
tie.
So in this particular case, for the word
tietää, I think that Wiktionary gives the best information (fairly comprehensive and most easily-accessible for English-speakers), but each of the other resources adds something else to it, each with a different emphasis or perspective. I personally tend to start with the Estonian Etymological Dictionary as a starting point (because it offers cognates in many languages and gives multiple etymologies for words for which the origin is uncertain, whereas Wiktionary tends to just pick one of them and state it as fact) and then use the information from there to look up cognates in the other dictionaries after that to get more info, but with that, it helps that I can read the Estonian entries and know the Estonian cognates. In your case I'd probably start with Wiktionary and, if it doesn't have what you want, go to the other resources from there.
Woods wrote:Ovatko muut ihmisiä kuin Naava vielä tässä?
I read the posts here sometimes, but don't know enough Finnish to reply!