Lõkad, lõkmed ja… lõke?

This article explores the origins and connections of the Estonian words lõkad ‘the white bands of a minister’s clerical collar’ and lõkmed ‘the small trapezoid-shaped coloured tabs on the corner of a uniform collar (indicating branch of service or area of duty)’. In standard Estonian, both meanings are metaphorical. The metaphor rests on a comparison with the human dewlap, a rooster’s wattle, and fish gills: in dialects, lõkk, gen. lõka means ‘dewlap, fold; wattle; gill’ (also ‘clerical collar’), while lõkmed means ‘gills; corner of the mouth; wattle’. What unites these body parts – whether of people, poultry, or fish – is their light mobility. Given the closeness of these dialectal meanings, it is plausible that lõkad and lõkmed share a common root. The stem lõkk- is most likely phonetically motivated. Dialects also contain many words with close semantics but based on stems with varying first syllable vowels and internal consonants, e.g., lokk, gen. loki ~ loku ‘dewlap; wattle’, lõt́t, gen. lõti ‘fat fold; wattle; gill; collar corner’. Julius Mägiste compared the words lõka ‘preacher’s bands’, lõkk, gen. lõka ‘rooster’s comb’, lõke, gen. lõkme ‘gill cover’, along with others, etymologically to the Finnish verbs lekkua ‘to sway, oscillate, jump’, lekuttaa ‘to rock, sway, swing’. This comparison is convincing. According to the Finnish etymological dictionary (SSA), the verb lekkua ‘to sway, move, frolic; to shimmer’ (cf. Finnish lekko ‘flame, fire; heat, sunshine’) belongs to a Finnic word family divided into two semantic groups: one denoting light, back-and-forth movement in general, the other more specifically describing the movement of fire and, synesthetically, the sensation of heat associated with it. The Estonian words belonging to this family – lõkatada ‘to flare up’, lõke ‘flame, blaze, fire’, lõkata ‘to burn with a big flame’ – relate to the latter semantic group. Words like lõkad, lõkmed, lõkutid, etc., on the other hand, can be added to the first group as expressions of movement more generally. From this, it follows that lõkad, lõkmed, and lõke are indeed etymologically related.