kuhtuma ja kuihtuma

In the early decades of the 20th century, Johannes Aavik proposed enriching the vocabulary of the Estonian literary language by incorporating both the southern Estonian dialect-derived kuhtuma ‘to become weak or feeble, to tire; to fade away, to wane; to extinguish; to wither, to wilt; to pale, to grow pale’, as well as the Finnish borrowing kuihtuma ‘to wilt, to dry up (plants, flowers)’. The article briefly touches on how these words have since fared and then delves into their possible origins. The verb kuhtuma lacks a satisfactory etymology so far: the explanation that the verb is irregularly derived from the word kuiv ‘dry’ is not convincing. The article suggests that the verb kuhtuma has a phonetically and semantically suitable etymological counterpart in the Mordvinic root *koštV-, which is associated with, for example, Erzya koštams ~ kovštams, Moksha kožftams ‘to dry, to harden (for a short while); to become (somewhat, partly) drier, to harden’, etc. There are examples in the Baltic-Finnic-Volga common vocabulary that credibly confirm the possibility of such phonetic correspondence. The article considers one possible evolution, where Finnish kuihtua (> Estonian kuihtuma) and Karelian kuihtuo ‘to wither, to dry up; to shrivel, to wizen’ are a contamination of the verbs *kuhtua and Finnish kujua, Karelian kujuo ‘to ail, to be ill, to ache, to languish, to wither, to wilt’.