The North Saami word luohti denotes ‘yoik’, i.e., a traditional Saami song typically characterized by a chanting singing style, pentatonic and anhemitonic melody, and lyrics usually consisting of a few phrases attributed to a particular person, place, or the like, and often figurative in nature. It is interesting that although luohti is a central lexical item in the sphere of culture-specific vocabulary, it has very few obvious etymological counterparts outside North Saami. The only transparently related form is SaaI lyeti ‘yoik’. However, the four-volume Inarilappisches Wörterbuch attests the word from a single informant only; according to Jouste (2011 : 77), however, archived audio materials attest to the word having being used by a few Aanaar Saami singers. Even so, lyeti seems to have been a relatively rare word in Aanaar Saami, and may well have been originally borrowed from the immediately neighboring eastern inland dialects of North Saami.
Thus, the word luohti actually forms a lexical isogloss that rather neatly distinguishes North Saami from all the other Saami languages, which use words of different origin to denote more or less similar traditional singing styles. West of North Saami we find SaaL SaaP vuolle, SaaU vuöllie and SaaS vuelie. A corresponding form vuolli actually also occurs in the westernmost Torne dialects of North Saami, where it must have been borrowed from Lule Saami. East of North Saami another word is found: SaaI livđe, SaaSk leuʹdd, SaaK lïʹvvd, SaaT luʹvvde. It is interesting to note that the geographic distributions of the three words quite exactly match the division of traditional Saami singing styles into three groups: South and West Saami chants, North Saami chants, and East Saami chants (Kulonen & al. 2005: 46). Whether this lexical divergence was a direct consequence of divergent developments in singing style is a question for future research; here I will only deal with the origins of the words theselves.
The etymologies of the western and eastern words are well-established. The western words (SaaS vuelie, etc.) belong to the historically oldest lexical stratum: they reflect PSaa *vuolē and ultimately PU *wala, and have cognates in Finnic, Mordvin, and Samoyed languages: cf. Fin vala ‘oath’, MdE val ‘word’, Ngan bǝli̮, EnT bare ‘song’ (Aikio 2006: 26–27). The eastern words, in turn, are early borrowings from Nordic: they reflect (post-)PSaa *livδē which in its turn was borrowed from Early Norse *liuða, the form ancestral to ONo ljóð ‘verse or stanza of a song’, Icel ljóð ‘poem’. The Norse word ultimately reflects PGerm *leuþa- and is cognate with OEngl leōþ ‘song, poem, ode, verses’ and OHGerm liod ‘song’ (> Germ Lied ‘song’).
The origin of SaaN luohti has remained unclear, however. It has been proposed that luohti originally meant ‘song of incantation’ (a meaning attested in some earlier references) and is thus related to SaaT lïïʹhhte ‘sacrifice; pre-Christian religion of the Saami’; these forms could, then, be interpreted as Nordic loanwords deriving from the word represented by ONo blót ‘worship; sacrifice; sacrificial feast; idol’ (LägLoS II: 229–230). However, in light of phonological facts this comparison is clearly in error: SaaT lïïʹhhte presupposes a Proto-Saami form *luottē with a geminate stop, and it would thus regularly correspond to a North Saami noun of the form *luohtti (gen/acc *luohti) – not to the noun luohti (gen/acc luođi), which shows a single spirant đ in the weak grade and can thus only reflect PSaa *luotē with an original single stop *t. Moreover, there actually is another North Saami form that is historically related to SaaT lïïʹhhte: the otherwise unattested North Saami noun *luohtti does occur in its compound form (luohtte-) in the obsolete compound word luohttemuorra ‘sacrificial tree’, which exactly matches the SaaT compound lïïʹhhtemïïrr with the same meaning (cf. SaaN muorra, SaaT mïïrr ‘tree’). It is noteworthy that this compound word further corresponds in both its structure and meaning to ONo blóttré (cf. tré ‘tree’), which in the Hervarar saga is decribed as a holy tree that was reddened with the blood from a sacrificial horse. Thus, it is completely clear that SaaT lïïʹhhte and SaaN luohtte- were borrowed from PNo blót or from its predecessor PNo *blōta-, and probably also the Saami compound word meaning ‘sacrificial tree’ was formed according to the model of ONo blóttré. SaaN luohti ‘yoik’, however, must be an etymologically unrelated word of different origin.
In this connection one can also comment on the Northern Finnic word luote (usually attested in the plural: luotteet, luottehet) ‘spell, magic words’ (< *lōt̆te̮h). This word is sporadically attested in the Kainuu and Southeast dialects of Finnish, and in North Karelian. It is possible that this noun was derived from an underlying but unattested verb *luottaa ‘cast a spell, utter magic words’, which would have been homonymous with (but etymologically distinct from) the actually occurring luottaa ‘trust, rely on’. This lost verb *luottaa could have been borrowed from ONo blóta ‘worship; sacrifice’, a verb related to the aforementioned noun blót ‘worship; sacrifice; sacrificial feast; idol’. The dialectal Finnish verb luotella ‘rebuke, revile’ (attested in the South Ostrobothnian dialect) could then be interpreted as a regular frequentative derivative of the lost verb *luottaa. On the other hand, if the usage of luote as a noun is more primary, it could instead be a borrowing either from ONo blót or from Saami *luottē (> SaaN luohtte-, SaaT lïïʹhhte); in the latter case the source of borrowing would have been an extinct Saami language once spoken in Eastern Finalnd or Karelia. The latter option seems especially attractive when one considers the limited and northerly dialect distribution of the word (cf. LägLoS II: 229–230), but on the other hand, the suffixal element -e(he-) in the noun luote : luottehe- has no obvious correspondent in either the Norse or the Saami form.
The ultimate origin of these Finnish words is, however, of no consequence to the etymology of SaaN luohti ‘yoik’: the attempts to connect it with any of the other words discussed above must be rejected due to the phonological irregularity of the comparison. A much more promising starting point for its etymological analysis is provided by the Norwegian and Swedish noun låt ‘song, tune, track’, which is in both form and meaning strikingly similar to luohti ‘yoik’. Thinking from a purely phonological point of view, luohti could even be imagined as a relatively recent borrowing from the modern Nordic forms, with the Saami diphthong uo replacing the Nordic long vowel /ō/ (spelled ‹å›). This long /ō/ developed in the modern period from earlier /ā/, and borrowing would thus have to have taken place quite recently, because an earlier Nordic form of the shape /lāt/ would have yielded the North Saami form *láhta, or the like. However, it seems a highly unlikely hypothesis that a quite recent Nordic loanword was adopted as the name of a traditional Saami singing style which has throughout history been considered highly distinct from Norse singing styles by Saami and Norsemen alike, and also widely viewed as a sinful relic of pagan traditions by Nordic society. Moreover, also the second-syllable vowel in SaaN luohti could hardly be accounted for by modern Norwegian and Swedish låt. Thus, if the Saami and Nordic words are indeed etymologically connected, the borrowing must have taken place much earlier – as is the case, for instance, with Eastern Saami *livδē from Early Norse *liuða.
Considering the regular changes of vowels in Saami, SaaN luohti ‘yoik’ would go back to PSaa *luotē and yet further to pre-PSaa *lata, exactly like SaaL vuolle ‘yoik’ goes back to PSaa *vuolē and further to pre-PSaa and PU *wala. Modern Norwegian and Swedish låt, in turn, developed from ONo lát ‘sound; behaviour; loss, death’, OSw lāt, lāter ‘sound, tone’, further deriving from PNo and PNwGerm *lāta- (and, ultimately, from PGerm *lēta-). Thus, we can assume that PNwGerm *lāta- ‘sound’ was borrowed into Pre-Proto-Saami as *lata, and then regularly developed into modern SaaN luohti. The semantic development of the Saami word is thus closely paralleled by Norwegian and Swedish låt. The association of the Germanic word to musical sounds seems to be limited to continental Nordic languages, but this might be an archaic semantic feature despite of not being directly attested in Old Norse. The insular Nordic languages have preserved the word in quite different meanings: cf. Faroese lát ‘birdcall’, Icelandic lát ‘death, loss’.
As regards the sound correspondences, there is a nearly homonyous Saami word which provides an excellent parallel for the correspondence between SaaN luohti and its Germanic loan original, namely SaaN luohtu ‘forest, woodland, uninhabited territory; summer pasture of reindeer’. The word reflects PSaa *luotō and has cognates in the eastern Saami languages: cf. SaaI luátu ‘free pasture; uninhabited woodland’, SaaSk luâtt-puäʒʒ, SaaK luõdd-poaʒ, SaaT lïõdd-poaʒaj ‘free reindeer’ (puäʒʒ etc. ‘reindeer’); (locative case forms:) SaaSk luâđast, SaaK luõđast, SaaT lïõdast ‘free (of reindeer in summer)’. West of North Saami the noun *luotō itself is not attested, but it has formed the derivational base of SaaL luodok ‘a bear which has not encountered humans before’, luohtok ‘wild animal (of any kind)’.
Previously the Saami word has been considered a loan from Finnic: cf. Finnish luoto ‘rocky islet’, Karelian luoto,Olonetsian luodo ‘rocky islet; shallows, shallow place in water with a sandy or muddy bottom’, Veps lodo ‘shallows, shallow place in water’, Vote looto ‘rocky islet’ (< PFi *lōto). The etymology would be phonologically quite straightforward, but the semantic connection seems far-fetched: the development from ‘rocky islet’ or ‘shallows’ to ‘(uninhabited) woodland’ and ‘summer pasture (of reindeer)’ would require multiple intermediate steps, but no evidence for such intermediate meanings can be found in either Saami or Finnic. There is also a more marginal meaning ‘stony or rocky place in a field’ in Finnish dialects, and dialectal Estonian lood has been attested in the sense of ‘barren ground with little or no top soil’, but these data do not really bring the comparison semantically any closer. Note, furthermore, that an obsolete Akkala Saami word ‹luott› ‘rocky islet’ has also been attested. This, however, hardly corroborates the idea that the much more widely attested Saami nouns meaning ‘uninhabited woodland’, ‘pasture’, etc. developed from an earlier sense of ‘rocky islet’: the Akkala Saami form is best interpreted as an unrelated word that was quite recently borrowed from (Northern) Karelian luoto ‘rocky islet’, and it does not need to have any etymological connection with the words in other Saami languages.
Due to these semantic problems it is preferrable to look for another etymology for PSaa *luotō ‘uninhabited woodland; pasture’. The word would regularly reflect pre-PSaa *lato, so it can be straightforwardly compared to PNwGerm *lāþa- ‘land, pasture’. As an independent noun this Germanic word is rather sparsely attested: its reflexes are ONo láð ‘land’ (mostly used in poetic language) and OEngl lǣð ‘an administrative district (containing several hundreds)’. However, the meaning ‘pasture’ is found in a compound word: Sw fälad, OSw fælaþ ‘common pasture, shared pasture’ (< *fehu-lāþa-), the first part of which is fä ‘cattle’ (< PGerm *fehu-). Ultimately the noun goes back to PGerm *lēþa-; note also the related adjective *un-lēdaz > Goth unleds ‘poor’, OEngl unlǣd ‘poor, miserable, unfortunate’, the original sense of which has been “landless, having no land”.