Personal Names of the Finnic Population in the Toponymy of North-Western Belozerye

Abstract

The article deals with personal names of Finnic population retrieved from the toponymy of the northwestern part of the Lake Beloye region (Belozerye). Among these names, the author first distinguishes Christian names adopted into the Vepsian language and preserved in the actual Vepsian informal names of villages (Zaharanag’, Jušaag’) and farmlands (Makaranpust, Marinannit’), sometimes in hydronyms (Ignatoja). In some instances, such place names have parallel Russian variants, cf. Vepsian Minačag’ – Russian Minačevo. The author also identifies a group of personal names that belonged to the Finnic population of the region and are still discernable in semi-calques ending in -ozero preserved in the substrate toponymy of the northwest of Belozerye: Davyd (Davydozero), Grig (Grigozero), Platan (Platanozero), Maksim (Maksimozero), etc. In a number of toponyms containing the non-suffixed form of a personal name the author assumes the loss of the formant -ozero: Egor, Denis, Ignat, Simon, etc. These place names are supposed to come from Finnic originals (some of them have parallels in the actual Vepsian toponymy: Grigd’är’f, Denisgärv, Platang’är’v). Besides that, in the northwest of Belozerye there is a number of village names with the Russian suffixes -in and -ev/-ov whose stems are not transparent from the Russian-language perspective and which can be traced to names of Finnic origin (including non-Christian ones and probably nicknames), cf. Kindaevo, Pindino, etc. The paper also focuses on the geographical distribution of the names under study and on possible approaches to the identification and verification of the presence of the personal names of Finnic population in the toponymy of the Russian North. The analysis is based on the data retrieved from the files of the Ural University Toponymic Expedition and the GIS “Toponymy of Karelia” developed at the Institute of Language, Literature and History of the Karelian Research Center RAS (Petrozavodsk).

Keywords

• anthroponymy
• Christian names
• Russian language
• Finnic languages
• toponymy
• Belozerye
• language contacts