There’s a road in Loos called Kylätyevägen. The first and the last part make sense – kylä is Finnish and means village and vägen is Swedish and means road. But tye? Not a word I know, in either language. Then I said it out loud in my mind and it clicked. It’s Kylätievägen. Tie is Finnish and means… road. So it’s Village Road Road! Seeing such a mix of languages over here is not unusual. Some of the names are in Swedish, some in Finnish, and some in bad Finnish. Or a mix of them all. This is because Loos is on the border to a region called Orsa-Finnmark, the name being derived from the Finnish immigrants who moved here a few hundred years ago when Finland was suffering from a big famine. Only the Finns were tough enough to make a living in the remote forested areas where no self-respecting Swede would set their foot in, not even to collect taxes would you believe. Things have changed since then – now they collect taxes. But otherwise it’s still a largely uninhabited area with only small villages here and there, albeit with two major transportation arteries running through, the Inland Railway and Inland Road.
So of all the places in Sweden, I have ended up just right – a Finn in Finnmarken. Not that I go out of my way to seek people who still speak any Finnish, in fact I seem to have a tendency to go out of my way to avoid them (regardless of the language, actually). But one thing that does provide me endless entertainment is the legacy the old Forest Finns have left behind them, in the form of place names. The names themselves are such that you can find anywhere in Finland, but the entertainment value is really created by the Swedes who have had to adopt these names and create the maps and signs. The Swedes (or come to think of it, any non-Finns) just point blank refuse to believe that our language might contain such letter combinations as aa or uo or kk and liberally replace these with their own phonetics.
Porrohara had me going in loops for a while. It doesn’t mean anything in Finnish spelled like that, while at the same time it looks deceptively Finnish so it is acceptable to us. But then I used the same trick, I said it out like a Swede would say it, and it came out as…. Purohaara. Or take Amasou. It ain’t Swedish for sure, so it has to be Finnish. But it isn’t quite Finnish either… until you pronounce and spell it Aamasuo.
And then we have these cases where they just simply can’t decide how to spell the name so they keep mixing it, just to make sure they get it right at least once. Is it Pilkalampinoppi or Pilkkalampinuppi? Or Pilkalampinuppi? When you approach the place, the sign (correctly) says Pilkkalampinuppi. By the time you’re up there, they have dropped a k and changed a vowel so it’s Pilkalampinoppi.
At least they kept all the i’s. Unlike with Korpmägg. Korpimäki sounds more familiar, but I have to concede that the trailing i is often almost silent (just almost, never completely!), so if you don’t use it in your language, it’s easy to ignore it. And here we also find out that the consonants are another source of confusion, with us Finns treating the soft consonants b, d and g (as in ”go”) as foreign bodies and in the olden days we only used the respective hard consonants p, t and k. Except, we pronounce them somewhere in between soft and hard so sometimes it’s hard to tell which one we mean. As other languages started intruding in the old Finnish, we had to adopt the new letters as well. But we didn’t have to learn to pronounce them properly!
Then there are times I complicate matters too much myself. For example, Gethel-vete had me vexed. Gethel-vete? What’s that supposed to mean?
Oh you mean Get-helvete… But it makes you curious, why is this place a goat hell?
I may not officially be a linguist anymore, but once you get in the habit, it’s hard to shake it. I couldn’t have picked a better place to keep it up!