About the provenance of the province names in Finland

By Carl O. Nordling

 

The territory that to day constitutes the Republic of Finland was for a long period of time a part of the Realm of Sweden. In all probability, Swedes were living in certain parts of Finland even long before there was anything like a Swedish State at all. In this stage the provinces, or ”lands” (landskap in Swedish, maakunta in Finnish), were the relevant legal and ecclesi­as­ti­cal units. The Law of these provinces was certainly exercised by Swedes also in cases where Samis or Finns may have formed a substantial part of the population.

                The time-honored names of the provinces now forming the Republic of Finland are the following:

 

                                       

 

Swedish name   Finnish name     Latin name
Nyland    Uusimaa   Nylandia
Tavastland   Häme (Hämeenmaa)     Tavestia
Karelen Karjala Carelia
Savolax Savo (Savonmaa) Savonia
Egentliga Finland Varsinais-Suomi  Fennia
  Satakunta  
Österbotten   Pohjanmaa (Itäpohja)   Ostrobotnia
Lappland  Lappi (Lapinmaa)  Lapponia
Åland Ahvenanmaa (Oolanti)  Alandia

                              

 

                While the origin of the Swedish names of the various provinces in Finland can be traced back to the 14th century or longer, this is not the case with the corres­pon­ding Finnish names. This is so because no text in Finnish of any importance was published until 1548. It is therefore impos­sible to determine if the Finnish names are older or younger than the Swedish ones--except in the case of Uusimaa. The latter is an obvious Finnish translation of the Swedish name Nyland, meaning ’new land’. It would have been a natural designation if used by the Swedes who settled on this virgin soil in the early Middle Ages. (When French fishermen about 1500 began using the profitable fish-waters off Newfoundland, they too applied the name Terre Neuve to the adjacent island.) The name Nyland has been used at least since 13101. The coastal part of Nyland is still populated by ethnic Swedes. In early Icelandic literature the name Bála­gards­sída (’Side of the pyre yard’) crops up a number of times, apparently relating either to Nyland or to the south-western part of Finland in general2. In any case Bálagardssída--probably an Icelan­dic kenning--belongs to an older historical stratum than Nyland.

                The Swedish name Tavastland was used already by the Vikings. Spelt Tavestland it is seen on rune stones from about AD 1030. In these cases the name probably referred to a province in Estonia--the middle component, est, may obvi­ously refer to the name of the people of Estonia, the eesti.3 As a term for to day’s pro­vince so called, the name Tavastl­and has been known from about 1300 to present. The Finnish counterpart is Häme, a name occurring for the first time (in the form Hemen maa, ’land of Heme’) in the cleric Michael Agricola’s preface to his New Testament translation from 1548. In this case the Finnish and Swedish names are totally independent of each other.

                If a name such as Häme or Hämeenmaa had existed when the Swedes needed a name for the province, it is likely that a Swedish form of the Finnish name had been adopted (as in some of the cases considered below). Consequently, it is pro­bable that the Finnish name is of later provenance. It has been suggested that häme could be the Finnish form of the Sami word saami (meaning ’our own people’)4 or that it is dervied from hämä ’scepter’5 (a word not to be found in Lönnrot’s comprehensive Finnish-Swedish dictionary of 1880). The former etymo­logy would require Finnish and Sami to have a common origin independent of Estonian, Vote, Veps, etc., which is apparently not the case. The latter etymology implies that the Province once had a Finnish speaking ruler using such a scepter as a symbol of his authority. There is not the slightest evidence of such a state of things.

                Most probably, the name Hämeenmaa (later Häme) was introduced some time during the period 1300-1548. It seems likely that the word designating the inhabi­tants of Häme preceded the name of the Province as far as the Finnish usage is concerned. The provinces were a concern for the Swedish admini­strators, while country populations, various villagers, etc. were the concern of the common people in the first place. In such a situation, nicknames are rather common. Some­times nicknames grow into accepted names, as in the case of Tories and Whigs, perhaps also Eskimo (’raw-meat-eater’). It seems possible that the name of Häme is a second-hand creation, derived from a primary hämäläinen, suppo­sedly used as a disparaging nickname applied to the typical inhabitant of the Province. He would thereby have been characterized as a clumsy simpleton. (This was one of the meanings of hämäläinen in the 19th century, according to Lönnrot6 and Rühs7. We note that the word hämä means ’mixture, obscurity, confusion’ and the word hämälä ’abode of obscurity’. The latter word is used in phrases like mene hämälään! ’go into the dusk!’ (where you belong because your are nuts) or hän meni hämälään, literally ’he went into the dusk’ (i.e. ’he made a fool of himself’).

                The inhabitants of Häme/Tavastland have had for a long time a deep-rooted reputation of being nuts. Even scientists have described them as ”glum, taciturn, dull, tardy and unsociable”8. In Finnish, Sami, Swedish and Danish there is a word mähä meaning ’milksop, fool, one who is nuts’. The word as pronounced in Fin­nish (with two short syllables, stress on the first) probably mimics the verbal reactions of such a person, who frequently utters (in Finnish) hä?’’what?’ and mä?’’me?’ because he is unable to keep up with the questions of other people. An original variant hämä  (pronounced approximately as hammer) would have served the same purpose until it became associated with a certain ”tribe” by the addition of the suffix -läinen (which means ’person who belongs to’). Since hämäläinen cannot be used to mean ’simpleton’ any more, another similar word has taken its place, i.e. hölmöläinen. Also the folkloric abode of obscurity is nowadays called Hölmölä rather than Hämälä.

                It would be natural to deduce a province name from hämäläinen by remo­ving the suffix. The result would be either Hämä or Hämälä, because -läinen as well -inen are used as suffixes (both with the same meaning). A slight change of the former word would produce Häme thus distinguishing it from hämä ’obscu­rity’.

                Another province name in Finland is Karjala. (The Swedish name is Karelen, possibly derived from the Finnish form.) If we assume the same type of etymology for Karjala as for Häme, the former name would be derived from karjalainen meaning ’inhabitant of Karjala’ but also ’stock farmer, person con­nec­ted with cattle’ (Finnish karja means ’cattle’). The latter meaning may well be the original one and consequently even Karjala may be a derived name (produced by the removal of -inen). The inhabitants of Karjala could supposedly have had a repu­tation of depending more on stock farming than other Finns. As a matter of fact, the yield per hectare of rye and wheat is rather low in Karjala while hay gives good yields there9.

                Between Karjala and Häme there is the province called Savo (Savolax in Swedish). An inhabitant of Savo is called a savolainen, which is rather close to savulainen ’person connected with smoke’ (savu, sauhu ’smoke’).  The latter form may well be the original, because burn-beating was once common in the Pro­vince, and this kind of tillage goes with a lot of smoke. Incidentally, the word savu may have given birth to the internationally known Finnish word sauna as well (from the inflected form sahuna ’in the smoke, during the smoke’). The traditional sauna lacked a chimney and was filled with smoke during heating. The addition of the ending -lax in the Swedish form is still unexplained. The ending occurs in many Swedish bay names that are of Estonian/Finnish provenance.

                Adjacent to Häme/Tavastland is the province originally called Finland. This is a Swedish name, originally meaning ’land of Sami’ (Finn is the old Scandi­na­vian word for ’Sami’--retained as such in Norwegian, replaced by lapp in Swedish). The old Finnish name of the Finland province was Suomi (now Varsinais-Suomi, i.e. ’Finland proper’ since the name Suomi/Finland was applied to the whole country). An inhabitant of the Province was called a suomalainen. This word is a good likeness to suomaalainen ’person conected with marshy ground’. The word is a compound consisting of suo ’marsh’, maa ’land, ground’ and the usual suffix -lainen. Obviously suomaalainen could have been a nickname just as well as the others, although in this case is does not fit equally well to the actual facts on the ground. Varsinais-Suomi/Egentliga Finland is not a specially marshy province. Anyway, Professor Väinö Voionmaa argued in 1943 for the identity of Suomi with suo-maa10. Today, the word suomalainen has the double meaing of the two French words Finnois and Finlandais, meaning respec­tively ’Finnish speaking person’ and ’inhabitant of Fin­land’. (Even in English usage the word Finn may be replaced by Finlander whenever the meaning of ’Finlandais’ should be empha­sized.)  Finnish also lacks the possibility to distin­guish between Finland and Finnish (the language); the word Suomi covers both. The oldest meaning of the the word Suomi is retained in the colloquial expression Suomen Turku for the city of Turku/Åbo. The original meaning was ’The marketplace of the Suomi Province’, turku being an old loan-word from Old Russian torgu ’market(place)’. The Swedish word torg is of the same provenance--later borrowed into Finnish as tori.

                There are three more provinces in Finland, called (in Finnish) Satakunta, Pohjanmaa and Lappi.  The two former names are definitely not derived from the names of the corresponding inhabitants. The name Satakunta has no Swedish equivalent although it once designated one of the administrative provinces of the Realm of Sweden. The name is composed of the Finnish words sata ’hundred’ and kunta ’parish, company, zone’. The word kunta is borrowed from Germanic hun­dari, a term for an administrative unit comprising one hundred subunits. It may be that the province of Satakunta once had the duty to set up one hundred soldiers for active service (in cases of Swedish warlike expeditions).

                The Swedish equivalent of the province name Pohjanmaa is Österbotten, meaning ’east bottom’. The meaning of the Finnish name is ’land of bottom’ or ’land of the North’ since the word pohja has the double meaning of ’bottom’ and ’north’. Both versions are obviously connected with the names of nearby Gulf of Bothnia, Bottniska viken in Swedish and Pohjanlahti in Finnish. An earlier alias for Pohjanmaa is Itäpohja, ’East bottom’. Pohjanmaa/Österbotten is situated on the eastern side of the Gulf of Bothnia in contrast to Västerbotten ’West bottom’, on the western (i.e. Swedish) side.

                Finally there is the name Lappi (Finnish), alias Lappland  (Swedish). These names are either of Finnish or of Swedish provenance. Formally, the Swedish name is composed of lapp meaning ’Sami’ (person) and land. In Finnish the province name consists of the radical, while a Sami (alias Lapp) is called lappa­lai­nen--just as in the case of Häme/hämäläinen. From a formal point of view lappalainen could be derived from the word lappa. This word can, however, only mean ’plate’ or ’buckle’ and is therefore less likely as the root of lappalainen. A likely explanation would be that lappalainen is derived from the Swedish word lapp with addition of the suffix -lainen (to make it designate a person). In that case the province name would be secondary, just as Häme and Savo.  The Swedish word lapp, on the other hand, also occurs in the compound fattiglapp, ’poverty-stricken person, down-and-out’. As a single word Swedish lapp also means ’patch’ or ’cloth’, so that it would make at least some sense to use the word as a disparaging nick­name for a Sami.

                In addition to these names of former Swedish provinces in need of Finnish parallel names because Finnish was spoken there by a large part of the inhabi­tants, the unilingual, autonomous province of Åland (under Finnish sovereignty) has also been supplied with a Finnish name of old. This name is Ahvenanmaa, the literal meaning of which is ’land of perch’. The actual form of the name may be a case of popular etymology, created to make sense of a hypothetical Proto-Scandi­navian name *Ahvio-land as Professor Matts Dreijer has suggested11. *Ahvi-o is supposed to have been an old Germanic word meaning ’island, land by the water’. The word as such has developed into Swedish ö, ’island’. Acci­dentally, the word *ahvio could have been mistaken for ahva ’water’, a word that has become a and later å in Swedish. Thus the Finnish form Ahvenanmaa could originate from a modified semi-translation of *Ahvio­land, while the Swedish form Åland (pronounced awland) may derive from the supposedly later (mistaken) form *Ahvaland. We may note that the name Scandin-avia also contains the element *a(h)vio--at least according to Dreijer.

 

References:

1) Akter och undersökningar rörande Finlands historia till år 1401. Helsingfors                               1912, p. 121.

2) Islensk ordsifjabók, Reykjavík 1989.  Hugo Pipping, article in Namn och Bygd.                                  Vol 1, 1913, p.21-27

3) Nordling, Carl O., Gåtorna kring Birger jarl, Ösel och Borgå. Borgå 1976.

4) Suomen sanojen alkuperä. Vol. 1-2, Helsinki 1992-1995.

5) Vilkuna, Kustaa, article in Arx Tavastica 1970.

6) Lönnrot, Elias, Finsk-svenskt lexikon, I-II. Helsingfors 1874-1880.

7) Rühs, Christian Friedrich, Finland och dess invånare.  2nd ed. Stockholm 1827.

8) Haartman, Carl von, Försök att betämma den genuina racen af de i Finland                     boende folk som tala finska. Helsingfors 1846.

9) Atlas of Finland.  Helsinki 1925-1928, map 25.

10) Voionmaa, Väinö, article in Historiallinen Aikakauskirja 1943, No. 2.

11) Dreijer, Matts, Det åländska folkets historia,  Vol. I:1. Mariehamn 1979, p.141-42.

 

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