Naava wrote:Linguaphile wrote:pöytä table
pöütä table; palm of the hand
pöid instep, area from toes to heel
The top of your foot is also known as jalkapöytä ('foot/leg table') in Finnish.
FYI: The part that touches the ground is called jalkapohja ('foot/leg bottom') and the arch is jalkaholvi ('foot/leg vault'). The area you stand on when you're on your "toes" is called päkiä.
Body-part words in Finnic languages are fun, firstly because many of the parts tend to be defined differently from how they are defined or divided into parts in other languages*, but secondly because the various Finnic languages do it differently among themselves.
So the Estonian cognate to päkiä is päkk (gen. päka), which can be exactly what you described for päkiä (ball of the foot), or sometimes by extension the whole sole of the foot, but also the thumb plus the thick part of the hand below the thumb towards the wrist (ball of the thumb, thenar), or in some dialects just the thumb itself.
*Like, in Estonian the word for "hand" (käsi) is also the word for "arm", but then there is a word for various parts of the thumb (pöial is basically the same as the English word "thumb", but päkk is that plus the ball of the thumb and rüss is the tip of the thumb to the upper joint), several separate words for the palm of the hand (kämmal is the area from the wrist to the fingers, while peo is the inner parts of the hand and peopesa is the hollow in the center of this area), etc.) Not to mention the words that refer to spaces between body parts: kaenal is the side area between one's arms and one's upper body, süli is the upper area between one's arms and one's upper body, rüpp is the lower area between one's arms and one's upper body. These get variously translated as arms, lap, bosom, underarm, armpit, etc. and can cause hilarity when translated wrong, such as when someone carries kindling into the house in their lap or bosom, or holds in a small child their armpit.
United States (United States)
Germany (Deutschland)
)
Sweden (Sverige)
Finland (Suomi)
I mean, I knew that couldn't be right, but I had to look it up.