Ostseefinnisch tüttV, titt und tita. The Finnic tüttV, titt and tita; pp. 182-190

Usually the nouns tüttö, tütti, tüttü and their other phonetic variants are considered to be derivatives of the noun tütar/tütär ’daughter’. Most of the occurrences of tüttö, mainly meaning ’maiden, unmarried woman’ belong to the north of the Finnic area. Tütti is used in different meanings: mainly ’doll’ and ’little girl’ in Finnish and Karelian dialects. The Finnish tüttö is more frequent in Southeastern dialects, while tütti prevails in the Western dialect. According to semantic and areal data tütti could be a separate loan from Swedish or Low German. Low German origin is also conceivable for the Estonian and Votic word titt(e) ’doll; baby’ which has earlier been considered a variant of the Russian borrowing tita ’baby’. The deeper origin of the tütt- and titt-stemmed words as well as of tita seems to lie with words whose original naming motif used to be ’nipple; suck etc.’